


Little Beasts Hold Little Love

by EverybodyKnowsIt



Series: sikenverse [1]
Category: NCT (Band), SuperM (Korea Band)
Genre: Based off the Poem "Little Beast" by Richard Siken, Bastard Dynamics, Dirty Talk, Dom/sub Undertones, Established Relationship, M/M, Markhyuck Bastards, Markhyuck said we are rich. we are gay. we are emotionally unavailable, My Brain at 3am: what if donghyuck joined superm, Overstimulation, Praise Kink, Recreational Drug Use, Sci-Fi, The Ruinous Nature of Fame... and Capitalism, idolverse, there are only two vibes and that is horny and sad, this isn't... gonna end like u think it will. thats all ill say
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:07:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23340712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EverybodyKnowsIt/pseuds/EverybodyKnowsIt
Summary: He had green eyes,so I wanted to sleep with him—green eyes flecked with yellow, dried leaves on the surface of a pool-You could drown in those eyes, I said.Mark fucks filthy. Mark likes to pull his hair. Mark likes having his cock sucked sloppy. When his eyes cloud over and pupils ring dark, Mark likes to call himbaby. He fucks like he means it, but also like he doesn’t.It’s hard to explain, Donghyuck thinks, but that’s the nature of him too, inexplicable.Or rather-- an ascent to fame and descent to madness in seven parts.
Relationships: Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Mark Lee, Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Wong Yuk Hei | Lucas
Series: sikenverse [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1905850
Comments: 68
Kudos: 261





	1. tastes like kerosene baby

**Author's Note:**

> Find my playlist for this fic [here](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMMy-KKnB_uqfu9l5CW1JebPUacvTe_82)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _1_   
>  _An all-night barbeque. A dance on the courthouse lawn.  
>  The radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night  
> is thinking. It’s thinking of love.  
> It’s thinking of stabbing us to death  
> and leaving our bodies in a dumpster.  
> That’s a nice touch, stains in the night, whiskey and kisses for everyone._
> 
> _Tonight, by the freeway, a man eating fruit pie with a buckknife  
>  carves the likeness of his lover’s face into the motel wall. I like him  
> and I want to be like him, my hands no longer an afterthought._

_1_

_An all-night barbeque. A dance on the courthouse lawn._

He learns of his third debut not through company email, or his manager, or ravenous gossip columns, but rather, as all things in Donghyuck’s life center and orbit, through Mark Lee.

Mark approaches him in the practice room where he’s surrounded by the rest of Dream, nagging at the details of the choreography as a shepherd nudges his flock. His smile is so bright Donghyuck could swear his mouth was full of honey. “You son of a bitch,” Mark cries, hair mussed under a ballcap and face bare, and Donghyuck can’t even be mad at the interruption. 

Donghyuck just laughs, throws an arm around Jaemin’s shoulders and looks up at Mark from under his eyelashes, “You called?” He simpers, all greasy-like in the way that gets on Mark's nerves.

Jisung snorts from behind him. Knowing him, he’s already bored of the fox and hound games they play. Jisung leaves, lanky and pout-mouthed, to go back to practice and he takes Chenle and Renjun with him. Jeno and Jaemin stay for longer, shooting the shit and riffing off inside jokes like their own little tennis match-- but the Dream staff begin to get antsy and usher them back to formation in the center of the room. They don’t bother to hassle Mark, and by extension Donghyuck, for interrupting practice. They don’t because Mark doesn’t ‘drop-by’, it’s not in his nature, and they know this. 

The day Mark comes by for small talk rather than business-- _or pleasure_ , he thinks, because for Mark pleasure is business, and under his sweatpants the hickeys on his thighs ache in agreement--is the day the world will stop turning.

“You did it,” Mark continues fervently, once they’re alone-but-not-really-alone in their corner of the room. Donghyuck, for the life of him, doesn’t know what he’s done, but it must be better than just the usual of what he gives on _Haechan Cam Ratings 37.5%_. 

“What’re you even talking about?” Donghyuck says absently, more focused on where his water bottle may have wondered off to-- _or who took it, Renjun_ \--than indulging Mark’s latest little ambition.

“Oh you know,” Mark says with a shrug, like that explains everything. _He’s always like that_ , Donghyuck thinks irritated. Like his mind is going so fast he can’t bother to stop and explain to the rest of them. 

Donghyuck clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “I know you might have free reign to do whatever you please, but some of us have _work_ to do, so,” He’s given up on his water bottle, hands crossed in front of his chest and eyeing Mark down with an air of forced disdain. “If you don’t have anything useful to say, get the fuck out.”

Mark really must be pleased then, because he doesn’t indulge in the fight Donghyuck’s trying to pick, just stands there all self-satisfied, baptized under the fluorescent lights and grinning like a fool. “They haven’t told you then?” Half-question, half-statement, wholeheartedly smug.

 _“Told me what,”_ Donghyuck snaps, because of course management informed the golden son before the rest of them. Told Achilles the battle plan and left the foot soldiers to die in the muck. _He doesn’t like--_ He doesn’t like not knowing, that’s all.

“The eighth member--” Marks voice drops into a murmur, soft and low in a way that has Donghyuck’s pavlov’d heart dripping heat. “The eighth member of _SuperM_ , that new unit, you’ve heard the rumors,” he grabs Donghyuck’s shoulder and the warmth from his grip flowers across his skin. “It’s you, baby.”

Donghyuck stands, frozen in Mark’s grip, unsure of what to say or what to feel. It doesn’t jumble together in his head right-- Mark and him and the two of them together along with the entertainment industry's cream of the crop. He's spent _years_ fighting along with rest of the underdogs for a scrap of promotion, studio time, _anything_ \-- and now they want him in the lineup with _Exo_ 's and _Shinee_ 's wonderboys. Nothing makes sense anymore. He swallows thickly, sucks in air when it gets caught in his throat.

 _I don’t even remember auditioning_ , he thinks dizzily. _They must have just been watching_.

“I mean-- Mark that’s great, but we’re just about to start _Boom_ promotions and I--” _We’re finally fucking getting somewhere_ , is what he wants to say, _we’ve finally made it without you and you want me to leave?_ But he’s so thrown he doesn’t know what angle to retaliate on, what to say to make Mark _listen_.

Mark only shrugs, still smiling honey-mouthed, but this time Donghyuck wants to slap it off his face, “I know you worked hard, Duckie, you all did.” Donghyuck’s heart clenches, like Mark just ziptied it the tightest it would go. “But this is _important_.” His smile softens, the way Donghyuck thinks it does only for him, softens like the doves settling into the boughs of the fig tree. The ziptie slices right through him and the halves of his heart fall away as gently as forsynthia petals.

“So is _this_ ,” he urgently appeals, but Mark’s blood is boiling-hot and as long as Donghyuck’s known him, once he’s decided he’s never wavered. Not once. 

He still asks though-- _this, why can’t you give me this_ \--because Donghyuck only knows a losing battle once it’s swallowed him.

Mark reaches out, he hesitates-- one brief, shivering moment before his hands make their way to Donghyuck’s waist. “Remember what I promised you,” he murmurs, and the frenzy of atoms that make up Donghyuck’s skin tremble and boil under his clothes where Mark touches him. He wants to shiver with it, but doesn’t. “Remember what you told me?” His voice climbs higher in a mockery of Donghyuck’s, smiling sweetly, “ _Honey I’m gonna be a song that never dies_.” Donghyuck twists away to give him a well-deserved hit to the side, but Mark uses the opportunity to tug him even closer, and Donghyuck stumbles-- struck off balance, falling into Mark’s chest with a grunt. Mark’s still smiling, but it’s a lot less sweet. It makes him _want,_ somewhere deep and dark in the pit of his stomach. “Any of them could replace you over there,” he says, nodding to where the rest of dream stand tall in formation.

Donghyuck rears back as if struck, but Mark’s grip on his waist is too firm and he doesn’t go far. “What the fuck is _wrong_ with you, you absolute raging--”

“But there, in SuperM, it’ll be just the two of us,” he says, voice husky and sharp, like flint. Like surgeon’s thread, tying the two of them together. It’s always fascinating, he thinks, watching Mark shed his golden boy image like a skin. Seeing the snake-fangs underneath. He never gets tired of it. “Mark and Haechan, at the top of the world. Just like we always said.”

“No-- just like I always said,” Donghyuck bites back, more petulant than he means it to be, because Mark at fourteen never liked the way he said _us._ “You can’t just go around and say shit like that and expect me to drop everything.” It’s kind of a lie. You take what you can get around here. He’s already too tired to be angry.

Mark knows he’s lying too. He leans in, and his breath his hot and damp over the shell of Donghyuck’s ear-- too intimate for where they are now. “I think I can,” he murmurs, and when he leans back his golden boy persona is once again shrouding him like sheepskin. Eyes bright, teeth straight and features boyscout-pure. “It’s fate, Duckie, the two of us. Famous and together.” Donghyuck supposes that it is. He sighs and glances back to where Dream sways and spins through the last chorus of their title track without him. Fate is easy enough if you’re smart enough to accept it. Even if it hurts, especially if it hurts.

“Yeah,” he says, and he’s winning everything he’s ever wanted, but doesn’t know why he feels as though he’s lost. “It’s the two of us alright.”

“That’s my boy,” Mark says, all stormcloud heavy, and although Donghyuck rolls his eyes, heat simmers fiercely in his gut. The same must be true for Mark, because as he turns to leave he stops, looks back. “Come to my room tonight.” His eyes are shining wicked through the neutrality of his tone. “Doyoung’s away for the weekend visiting his brother.” Mark smiles, and the only thing that betrays the purity of it is the red flush of his ears. He bites his lip down on a grin that Donghyuck begrudgingly knows would charm him silly, “Show me what Korea’s burning Full-Sun is made of, yeah?” Donghyuck slaps him on the shoulder, tells him to fuck off and be a freak somewhere else as he pushes Mark out the door. 

But maybe he’s a freak too, because he shows up outside Mark’s door at eleven pm sharp just the same.

 _I’ll show you,_ he thinks, and when Mark opens the door, sleep-rumpled and shirtless, he knows he’ll win this round for sure. _I’ll show you_ , Mark echoes, as he pulls Donghyuck through the door, hands greedy and branding. Under the light of an oyster cracker moon, Mark moans into his neck and the sound drips like honey. Donghyuck is rambling, low and sweet and crooning because it makes Mark go crazy against him, “Only I get to see you like this, everyone wants you so bad hyung, but only I get to make you like this.” Mark sucks a bruise low on his neck, and weighted with pain the pleasure feels _ruinous_.

 _Mark and Haechan at the top of the world_ , he thinks deliriously as Mark shoves him rough against the bedroom door, _maybe that’ll be worth it all._

In the beginning, Donghyuck wanted. In the beginning, Donghyuck starved.

_The radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night_

_is thinking. It’s thinking of love._

In the morning comes a terse call from _SM Entertainment_ upper-management, confirming what Mark had told him the night before. Despite the unfairness of it all, he’s a little glad that he heard from Mark first. The time he’s had to settle with the knowledge of _SM_ ’s plans for him--with Mark between his legs-- it keeps his tone demure and thankful when they tell him to have his bags packed and ready to be moved from the _Dream_ dorm by nightfall. 

He still wants to argue, despite how pointless it would be, wants to tell them they can’t use him as a pawn where they see fit, even though in truth, they can. He wants to put up the fight on principle. Management ignores the honey-dripped snarl of his tone and tells him to be at the stylist’s by two, to change him from Lee Donghyuck to _SuperM_ Haechan, and they hang up. It went as well as it could, he guesses.

He sits in Mark’s bed for a long time, alone--Mark already long gone to who knows where--naked and still under morning sunlight shifting through the blinds. He gets up. 

Gets dressed. Gets coffee. Gets on with it.

He gets there fifteen minutes earlier than they told him, ballcap slung low, black mask over his bare face, drowning in Marks old clothes he stole from the bottom of the dresser, but everyone else is already there. 

Everyone is dozing or half-way there-- Mark himself tapping away furiously at his phone as he goes through the laborious process of dyeing his hair from blond back to black. He takes careful note of who else is here, even though his manager already told him the unit lineup. 

There's Baekhyun and Kai relaxed and chatting casually in their chairs as hairstylists trim their bangs. Baekhyun sees him and winks from under a shockingly cotton candy fringe. Donghyuck, blessed with neither good sense or impulse control, winks back. Baekhyun laughs.

There’s Taemin trying on concept outfits on the other side of the room, shirt off and thrown to side, and Donghyuck, starstruck and embarrassed, quickly turns away.

He sees Lucas, surrounded by tape measures and leather straps, and waves. He knows Lucas, but more importantly, he knows Lucas likes him, and it’s a quiet relief when Lucas furiously waves back, nearly knocking down three people in the process. Taeyong, very obviously struggling to keep his eyes open, is engaged in a one-sided conversation with Ten. Ten, gossiping, surrounded by makeup brushes and with his hair pulled back, reminds Donghyuck fondly of the neighborhood aunties back home. 

He laughs quietly under his breath, from the thought of Ten in curlers but also from the awkwardness of loitering in the center of the room. He considers grabbing one of the frantically buzzing assistants to ask where he should place himself, but before he can finish the thought he's being pulled by the nape of the neck into a chair, his complaints instantly quashed by the cutting glance of a woman he knows must be a stylist. _You're late_ , she says, and before he can muster the courage to argue she's already at work. She briefly examines him, as a scientist would examine bacteria in a petri dish, before running a chilly hand across his face to get a feel for his features.

He’s used to it, the poking and prodding, but it’s never nearly as brusque as this.

 _Supposedly, the concept for this debut is Avengers,_ the stylist tells him, running her fingers through the tangle of his hair and tutting at the knots she finds. _Lots of black, lots of leather and chrome, very sexy._ She’s older than the girls who usually are in charge of his hair and makeup-- maybe in her late-thirties, a tastefully made-up woman with nimble fingers and sharp, appraising eyes hidden behind the frames of her glasses. 

She looks him over critically, her gaze roving across his soft hands and bruised shins and tawny skin swamped by _Comme des Garçons_ three sizes too big. He feels more vulnerable than when he was naked under Mark’s hands last night. She hums flatly, and he has enough dignity left to feel irritated. 

“Messy little thing, aren’t you?” She says, and the purse of her mouth confirms that it’s not a compliment.

His shoulders tense and he almost lets slip a thorny retort from the grit of his teeth. “You try being dressed up like a doll all hours of the day.” He can’t help but grumble, “Everyone gets tired of leather pants eventually.”

She tugs on his hair sharply and he hisses, “Enough with the lip.” She runs a single, impersonal crimson nail across the curve of his cheek. “Messy,” she says. “But very pretty.” It’s not praise, too unsentimental to be that, only an observation. 

Regardless, he sighs, “Thank you noona.”

Her fingers twist through the snarl of his hair once again, so tight he keens. He thinks if he survives this he’ll be beautiful but bald. “I used to work runways for Tom Ford,” she says, voice clipped. “I’m not your sister. It’s Hyojin.”

“Of course, Hyojin-noona,” he demures, hiding the taunt in the polite nod of his head. 

He closes his eyes in expectation of another admonishing tug of the hair, but nothing comes. She clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth, bone white hands on either side of her hips, “I see why they picked you.” Her voice is a shade warmer, but her face is still stiff and marble-sharp. “Messy and pretty and troublesome. They’ll eat you alive.” 

She beckons an assistant over, a frenzied girl barely out of her teens and barely out of college, much like the girls who used to style him before. _Before he was important_ , he notes blithely. Hyojin glances at him again sharply, but instead of speaking she stares for ten very long seconds.

He tries not to fidget. He fails.

“Ditch the neon dye.” She says impassively. “Bring me something soft.” She pauses, thoughtful. “Honey-brown. Warm but not copper.”

The assistant turns to leave, but then stalls, turns to Hyojin again, unsure, “But Lee Sooman-nim--”

Hyojin doesn’t look up from the makeup she’s inspecting from the black leather bag beside her, “I don’t recall Lee Sooman entrusting _you_ of all people with his vision, Seoyeon.” She seems to find the brush she was searching for and looks up, her eyes cutting right through the girl’s wide eyes and into her skull. Donghyuck thinks he can see the blood drain from her face. “Now if you please,” Hyojin says, not at all sounding like she cares what Seoyeon would please, “The dye.” 

She scampers off without another word. Donghyuck knows not to prod, but he also doesn’t care, “Why not neon then?”

Hyojin doesn’t sigh but makes a face that looks like she wants to, he thinks. “The concept is futuristic-- boys so bright they break your heart, _superheroes_ ,” she says distastefully, as if the very concept is too childish to bear. “But you,” she pokes a sharp fingernail into the swell of his cheek and pushes harder when he scowls. “The villain masquerading as the fragile, little Bond Girl.” She chuckles, a raspy sound that speaks of the disuse of laughter and too many cigarettes. “That’s what we’ll do with you. We’ll make that your concept, sunshine.”

She gets to work, trimming and dyeing and defining and powdering and cinching without another word. He relaxes into the familiar process-- of being made and unmade into the silhouette they want him to fill for every story.

Made and unmade. Delicate as sunlight and butterfly wings, then hungry and striking as summer’s monsoons. Made and unmade, again and again and again.

She spins around the chair for him to look at the finished product, and immediately walks off without so much a goodbye. He’s speechless by what he sees, a creature that is somehow, supposedly, him. It’s softer than the _Boom_ concept, he knows that for sure-- the thing in the mirror looking back at him has glossy, wide eyes shadowed in pink, crowned with curls of deer-velvet and burnt sugar syrup. 

It’s different though. Because it’s soft but it’s not _127 Touch_ or _Dream Chewing Gum_ or _ra! ra! pastel pretty boy_ like he’s used too. His skin’s darker than they’ve ever let it go, the structure of his face shaded and sloe-eyed and bronze. His cheeks are flushed not pink but _red_ , red like fever and red like sex and red like shame.

 _That must be why they hired her despite being a fucking bitch_ , he thinks, because it’s like Hyojin has taken him and turned up the saturation all the way, creating richer dark tones and brighter lights. 

He looks _too_ alive, as though every part of him is trying to convince that he’s more than human.

It’s unnerving. This sparkling creature grinning back soft and sharp in the mirror.

It’s unnerving, but when Mark sees him and drops his phone, lets it clatter and doesn’t even look for cracks as he picks it up and pushes Donghyuck into a secluded closet-- maybe it’s worth it. To be this creature.

He read somewhere that a body is an object is a currency is the price of someone’s splintering youth. It’s hard to explain. Just know that after a while, you begin to become a parody of yourself.

_It’s thinking of stabbing us to death_

_and leaving our bodies in a dumpster._

This year’s winter came in fits and starts. An October that comes with cut-glass and snow.

First stage. First performance. First chance, and the last.

He’s wearing too much makeup and he can’t stop shivering.

Everyone is busy and warming up and going through their own good luck charms and sequences-- he knows better than to interfere. Interfering means bad luck and a bad show and only his head in the guillotine. He wobbles over to a deserted speaker to sit, his concept outfit too tight to comfortably walk in. It’s all porcelain and leather and sugarcube sweet, nice enough to look at, he supposes, but dancing will be another beast entirely.

He wants to call his mom, who always knows what to say. He wants to call Renjun, who doesn’t always know but thinks he does, and that’s comforting enough. He wants to call Taeil, who loves him. He wants to call someone and have them listen.

They're called to the stage and the audience is roiling, chanting their names-- _his name_. He can’t quite breathe through the strangle of leather criss-crossing his chest, but when it’s said and done, stardust feels better filling his lungs than air. His chest burns, and so does Mark, where he raps filthy from the corner of his eyes.

It hurts to smile, but he tries to.

His manager gives his phone back at the end of the night, once he’s sweaty and breathing and buckled up safe in the backseat of the van. He unlocks it and immediately feels broiling, aching nausea churn in his gut. All of his saved numbers have been deleted. Except for seven.

Guess which.

He leans his head against the seat and closes his eyes. Within the crushing weight of the car, sleep doesn’t come. 

_If we crashed right now_ , he thinks, _do you think they’d even tell anybody?_

His phone blinks in the darkness. _No one to tell_. Blink. _No one to hear._ Blink.

_That’s a nice touch, stains in the night, whiskey and kisses for everyone._

It’s three am and Donghyuck can’t see through the haze of smoke and stink of spilled liquor. They’re in some club, all eight of them writhing in the champagne room, draped in sweaty velvet and surrounded by groupies piling up like gravedirt. Donghyuck takes a jello shot from Ten’s stomach and drowns his fatigue in blue-raspberry and the salt of sweat. It’s too sour, and Ten laughs, half-naked and fond, at the face Donghyuck makes when he puckers his mouth. Across the room, Mark has his tongue down some girl’s throat, and Donghyuck drowns the heartache in rum and coke. 

He blinks and The Weeknd is playing, thrumming through the air and sinking into his skin, crooning _heartless baby I’m heartless_ , and Donghyuck wishes he was too. He stares at the way the sequins on the girl’s dress glimmer like silvered mackerel skin when Mark slides a hand down her back, coming to rest right above her ass, and the way she melts into him. 

He stares and stares and stares and thinks that envy feels a little like heartache.

But he looks away, because he doesn’t want Mark to catch him, because he refuses to make a martyr of himself, because he’s fine-- he’s too drunk and too tired and too irritated to be anything but fine. He takes a deep breath, beats back the tightening of his lungs and the sting behind his eyes. The start of a headache pulses with the bass. He’s fine. He only drinks when he’s not alright and he only fucks Mark when nights are cold and he doesn’t even remember the last time he cried. 

He’s fine. He’s always been little bit of a liar, maybe.

 _You’re better than this, sulking over a fuckbuddy, a coworker, some boy,_ he thinks bitterly, but Mark’s also his best friend, and isn’t that what’s fucked up about them, huh.

Someone taps him on the shoulder and he jolts, turns to see Lucas with a drink in each hand. Lucas-- silly, sexy Lucas with curling bangs and big rough hands that he’d maybe like to feel around his throat. Donghyuck swallows and looks away, fiddles with the rings stacked on his fingers-- iridescent reflective in the sweltering neon lights.

“You’re too pretty to look that sad,” Lucas remarks absently, and he brushes his hand against Donghyuck’s as he passes him one of the drinks. Donghyuck can’t stand tequila, but he takes it anyway, lets a lazy _cheers_ roll off his tounge. Lucas idly studies him, his gaze kohl-lined and artfully vacant in that way only he can pull off. Lucas is perceptive, under the arrogant beauty of his boyish bravado, and he doesn’t like people to know it.

Donghyuck takes some of that bravado under his tongue with a sip of his drink and spits it back, “You think I’m pretty?”

Lucas shrugs, and the light reflects golden off the glitter lain high on his cheekbones. He’s blushing, Donghyuck catches a glimpse before the lights dim and fade into blue with the start of some syrup-slow R&B track. “You burn like the sun.” He says, like this is explanation enough. Maybe it is. Lucas speaks better in feeling than words, and Donghyuck squints at him standing pine tall in the ocean of cobalt club lights. It’d be so easy to take him for a ride, Donghyuck thinks. To swallow him whole, this blue-shadowed boy with blue-tinted hungers. He sees the way Lucas looks at him, sometimes: open, starving, hands grasping and mouth damp.

Lucas talks too loudly, stares brazenly, expresses just enough to get under Mark’s skin without raising eyebrows. _Your boy looks good today Mark,_ Lucas says while nudging an elbow into his side, _you be sure to take care of him or someone else might._

 _He’s not my boy_ , Mark always snaps, and he pushes Lucas’s wandering hands away from wherever they’ve come to rest on Donghyuck’s hip or back or waist. After these spats, Mark spends the rest of practice sullenly and studiously staring straight ahead into his reflection in the practice room mirror. He finishes his routine down to the last detail, and drags Donghyuck back to the dorms by the wrist. Those are fun, fun nights. Where Mark goes a little crazy and takes Donghyuck with him, leaves him trembling facedown on the mattress, leaves him forgetting how to breathe. 

Donghyuck shivers at the memory of phantom of teeth marking up the nape of his neck.

Donghyuck would be worried about that mouth getting him in trouble someday, if he didn’t know that it was all on purpose. He hasn’t figured out what game he’s playing, which one of them Lucas wants, if he wants either of them at all, but it sure is fun to roll the dice while finding out. He grins, because Lucas likes the look of cute little people smiling up at him, “Won’t you dance with me, Xuxi?” 

Lucas startles, “I--,” eyes widening under the realization that he’s caught in his own trap, “I didn’t think you’d ask.” Donghyuck laughs, knows the poor thing never stood a chance. 

They do the salt-lime-tequila body shot that Baekhyun taught him how to do at a different club in a different city. He licks a line of salt off Lucas’s collarbone and wonders if Mark liked him better blond. After salt goes patrón, and he doesn’t wonder anything after that. A cypher is playing now, the bass so acerbically pounding he can’t hear himself think, _but that’s the point of it,_ he supposes, _to let instinct override thought_. He downs the rest of his drink and grabs Lucas by the collar, pulling him to the mass of pretty young things writhing on the dance floor. 

Lucas starts out gentle, like he’s not sure if he’s really allowed to touch, hands skimming from Donghyuck’s waist to his hips and back up to curl lightly around his back. 

It feels nice, almost sweet, and Lucas is by no means a bad dancer, but it’s not what he wants. Donghyuck grabs his hands, _and fuck, his hands are so big_ , he thinks deliriously, big and deft with long fingers that would feel so _good_ slicked up and curling into him. Donghyuck swallows, moves Lucas’s hands to grip tight around Donghyuck’s waist-- the spread of them hot and pressing. 

The bass drops and lights dim with the last chorus, singer rapping fast and slurry about oral sex-- _send you to Hong Kong with my tongue technology_ , and Donghyuck presses the cut of his nails into Lucas’s shoulder, just to give a little bite, a little taste of what Donghyuck could _do_ to him given the chance-- and this riles Lucas up, makes him bite his lip and toss his head back as Donghyuck practically rides the thigh that Lucas has shoved in between his legs.

Lucas is so pretty like this, wine-dark hair and bitten-rose mouth, so handsome, thin silk shirt doing nothing to conceal the breadth of his shoulders and fever-heat of his skin.

He was already tipsy, but the way Lucas looks down at him, wide-eyed and wild, makes him feel drunk with power. 

He can to do nothing but cling onto Lucas’s shoulders and grind onto his thigh-- _Fuck_ , Lucas spits. Donghyuck does it again, this time stumbling as he drags his hips down, and Lucas catches him tight in his hands. “I’ve got you, up a little bit, _that’s_ it baby--” and he sounds so much like Mark when he calls Donghyuck _baby_ , voice deeper but intonation _just_ the same, and it should make him feel guilty, but it just makes it hotter. It’s hot because it feels bad, maybe. 

Donghyuck’s on him like he’s getting paid for it, tangling Lucas’s hair up in his fingers, his other hand gripping onto one of his belt loops, and Donghyuck suddenly, really wants to ride him. He grips Donghyuck’s ass in his palms. Donghyuck lets out a pleased little hum and Lucas growls, snarls right into his ear, calls him _Donghyuck-ah_ in a simpering voice that makes his toes curl. 

The chorus hits and it’s hard and fast and dirty, full of Donghyuck grabbing up on his hyung and so hard it hurts. 

The lights dim but not by much, the air turning soft and pink-kiss thick. A strawberry-fields light that highlights the bite of his lip as Lucas looks down at him. _Love Talk_ starts playing, and Donghyuck is drunk enough to laugh at the irony. Donghyuck is surrounded by Lucas, the warmth and strength of his arms as they cage him in and feel him up, and the heavy pressure of his voice from the speakers as Lucas’s voice tells him _baby come closer I’ve got what you want_. Lucas moans, rich and keening, into the curls on crown of his head. 

Donghyuck laughs, presses his thigh sharp and bruising to the tent in Lucas’s tight, _tight_ jeans. “Getting off to your own song?” He shakes his head in mock disdain, tone teasing and dirty, “You little slut,” he says fondly, and he yanks the hair at the nape of Lucas’s neck.

He sees Lucas’s adams apple bob as he swallows another moan. “I’m still your _hyung,_ Donghyuck-ah,” He’s whiny, which combined with the strength of his hands as they bruise Donghyuck’s hips, is addicting. “Show some respect,” he grunts. Donghyuck wants to see how far he can push him until he breaks.

“Yes, hyung,” he says, not at all kindly or sincerely, and then spins around until his back is pressed against Lucas’s chest and Lucas can get his face into the crook of Donghyuck’s neck

Donghyuck presses his back into Lucas’s front, tosses his head back until it thumps against Lucas’s chest, pushes his ass back, arches his back, places his hand on the back of Lucas’s neck, and rolls his hips back against Lucas’s dick so hard, like he’s actually trying to get himself fucked. 

“A bit faster Lucas, yeah baby just like that-” 

Lucas is holding onto him too low and too tight, but neither of them care. He pulls Donghyuck up until he’s pressed back on Lucas tight, and Donghyuck lets himself be manhandled, lets Lucas start a fire in his stomach. 

“Press harder, c’mon, good boy.” 

It’s just starting to get good-- _real good_ , blistering tremble of stars good, the good you only get drunk and with a hot body behind you, when he sees Mark approaching in the corner of his eye.

From what he can see through the dim and the moving bodies, he’s fuming. The kind of fuming he only gets when Donghyuck sets him burning.

As drunk as he is, his reactions are slowed, like moving through pink grenadine syrup. He looks up and Mark is front of them, hands clenched, “Get the _fuck_ off of him.” He blinks and Lucas is no longer a fevered heat behind him but stumbling back with a hand covering his face--

 _Oh no,_ Donghyuck thinks with dawning horror, _Oh fuck._

Somewhere, distantly through the speakers, Yangyang is telling them to make it clap.

_Tonight, by the freeway, a man eating fruit pie with a buckknife_

_carves the likeness of his lover’s face into the motel wall. I like him_

_and I want to be like him, my hands no longer an afterthought._

Security escorts them out of the club fifteen minutes later. Lucas is nursing a split lip. A sober, seething Taeyong nearly dragging black-eyed Mark by the ear. Donghyuck absolutely _fuming_. Taemin has a hickey on his jaw and Baekhyun has lipstick on his collar, both are so stoned Donghyuck almost gets a second-hand high from breathing near them. Neither of them are pleased. In the van, Ten throws up on Kai’s lap and passes out. There have been better nights.

Donghyuck is furious, bone-rattling, fever-eyed furious, absolutely appalled at the arrogance of Mark to drop his girl and his drink and come over to rip Donghyuck off Lucas and start a fight. What a presumptuous, hypocritical, goddamn _asshole_. 

“What do you see in that boy?” Taemin grumbles quietly as he leans back to nap against the headrest, bloodshot eyes fluttering shut.

 _Well,_ his traitorous mind supplies, _I wanted to be wanted and he was very, terribly lovely._

He doesn’t say this aloud, just turns to look out the window at the ashen skyline and pointedly away from where Mark is boring holes in the back of his head. He refuses to look back, because what Mark doesn’t seem to get is that just because you bring a body to rapture, doesn’t make it yours.

 _Sorry Duckie_ , Mark murmurs drunk from the backseat. His voice is paper-thin, genuinely contrite. He’s still so young. 

_Fuck you_ , Donghyuck thinks, _fuck you and the way you think you own me_ , but his heart is already softening.


	2. slave to this

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _2_   
>  _Someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure._   
>  _I’m sure you remember, I was on the phone with you, sweetheart._

_2_

_Someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure._

Taemin doesn’t like him. 

It’s understandable, really, and a lot of the time Donghyuck feels the same. Afterall, he is an expert, in the art of not liking Lee Donghyuck. But what confuses him is how ardently this sentiment persists.

It’s not because he makes mistakes. He doesn’t. 

If there is one thing Donghyuck knows how to do, ingrained into the flesh of his persona even to his very name, _full-sun_ , it is to burn the stage. He finishes every show with blisters on his feet and sweating the foundation off his face and his voice so hoarse he can barely speak. They love him, the crowd loves him, to the point of tears and howling, flushing sunburn red when he rips off his jacket and grinds low and dirty to the beat. _Bacchanal boy_ , Baekhyun calls him, because he makes the crowd lose their minds. 

_Right_ , Taemin adds derisively, eyes never leaving his phone, _our own little silver-tounged siren_.

It can’t be that Taemin doesn’t like him because he’s incompetent, because he’s not, and Donghyuck can’t begin to imagine how he’s slighted him any other way. 

No matter the reason behind it, theirs is a war that's fought silently, in between rehearsals and in the backseat of tour buses, Donghyuck’s sharp mouth and switchblade laughter as his knife and Taemin’s cold-eyed authority as his gun. 

You know what they say about bringing a knife to a gunfight. 

Taemin will sidle up to him backstage and he’s smiling, but to Donghyuck it doesn’t feel whole. It’s pretty with nothing inside, the rind without the fruit underneath. He’ll be so close that Donghyuck can feel the heat on his breath and he’ll swipe one finger across Donghyuck’s mouth, his other hand gripping his shoulder just on the uncomfortable side of strong. _You’ve smudged your lipgloss again with all that talking, Haechannie. Be careful_ , is what he says. _Don’t fuck this up_ , is what he means.

Baekhyun teases at how close they’ve gotten, _those two pretty little doves getting friendly in the coop_ , but Taemin’s expression tightens and Donghyuck’s not stupid.

He asks one day, over a cup of lukewarm convenience store coffee after Ten drags him out to 7/11 to buy a pack of smokes, why Taemin doesn’t like him. 

Ten looks at him oddly, but doesn’t bother to deny it-- he’s honest, maybe even when he shouldn’t be. _Hmm_ , Ten murmurs as he cups his hands to light his cigarette, _it's always hard to say, with that hyung_. He pauses to reach over to steal a sip of Donghyuck’s coffee, because Ten knows Donghyuck won’t complain while he still wants something from him. He’s unfortunately right. _If I had to guess_ , Ten starts, and it’s all formality, because Ten is clever at these kinds of things, at figuring out people and their pasts and the flaws that stick to them like wet rice paper. 

Ten’s the kind of boy who could chew you to the bone and spit out the marrow, if he wanted.

 _I think it’s because you remind him of himself, when he was younger_ , he says, idly scratching the back of his neck, cigarette dangerously close to lighting his hair aflame. _Remember when Jisung went on Why Not The Dancer and everyone called him a young Taemin? It’s like that, but you got all of the bad parts of him._

Donghyuck winces, opens his mouth to tell Ten where he can take his opinions and shove them, when Ten starts to speak again, eyes-narrowed and thoughtful through the haze of smoke. _You’re a young Taemin too, you know. Thorn-mouthed and bruise-kneed. Gunpowder angry with a cherry-pit heart. He was like that too._

 _Well maybe you’re wrong_ , Donghyuck had replied sullenly, though Ten never is.

Ten smiles, _No_ , he quips _, I don’t think I am. You both have the same bleached smile, straight outta one of those Pepsi Cola Ad_ _s_. He shrugs, leans over to put his cigarette out on the cement wall and crush it under his feet. _Anyway,_ he had said, already bored. _It’s not my problem_. And it wasn’t.

So if Jisung is the best of a young Achilles and Donghyuck is the worst of him, it’s a surprise that Taemin messages him privately to invite him to breakfast the next day. Donghyuck has little choice but to accept and play along. 

He plays along because it’s what he’s supposed to do. Because it’s written down. Because he’s memorized it. Because it’s all he knows. 

He never gets up before noon the day after a performance, but he manages it today, rubbing the sleep and leftover eyeshadow out of his eyes and hobbling across the floor on bruised and blistering feet. He goes to change the bandages on his feet and pulls skin away with it, heels caked with dried blood the color of figs. It stings, flesh still red-raw under his fingertips, and he takes a deep, whistling breath through his nose. He makes a note to text the stylists and ask for inserts for the next show, but then again, it doesn't matter, because he asked for them last night too. 

_Forget about it_ , he thinks while sticking on a fresh bandage, _and keep going_. Everyone else is doing just fine.

Donghyuck’s pulling on a beaten up old hoodie, black and too big for him-- Jaehyun’s maybe, as he walks down the hallway, keys in hand. There’s music spilling out from under the door to Mark’s room, and Donghyuck pauses in front of it. The thrumming of an acoustic guitar, the low husk of his voice, Donghyuck smiles. Silly boy. Silly, silly Mark who kisses with his eyes closed and drinks his coffee black and only feels joy while warbling with the bluebirds.

He sighs, exhausted, and continues walking down the hallway and down three floors on the elevator and to the lobby, where Taemin is already waiting for him out front. He looks good even on his day off, expensive jeans slung low on his hips, delicate silver chains looping around the willowy curve of his neck. He’s leaning against a sleek black Camaro crouched low to the asphalt, a car too self-indulgent to possibly belong to the company. The entire scene is flashy. Extravagant. Just the sort of thing Taemin would do to prove a point. 

Donghyuck doesn't give him the satisfaction of pointing out his car or his fresh face or the drip of his jewelry. He turns the other cheek, walks to the other side of the car and slides into the passenger seat, which would’ve been cool if he hadn’t nearly brained himself on the low-hanging hood. Taemin laughs, and it’s the first time he’s ever done so around Donghyuck. 

Donghyuck settles back in his seat and is only a _little_ starstruck.

The drive is quiet, absolutely, painfully so, and Donghyuck tries to turn on the radio to relieve the tension, but Taemin immediately slaps his hand away, eyes still on the road. _Not in my fucking car you don’t_ , he says, and Donghyuck slouches over his phone and seethes. _Fine_ , he thinks, _be an awkward old bastard and let us sit in silence._

And so they sit, for the next twenty minutes, till Taemin pulls up to the parking lot of some run-down strip, just outside the city proper. Taemin’s Camaro might be the most expensive thing on the entire block, Donghyuck would reckon, including the buildings themselves. _What the fuck_ , he thinks, _where the fuck are we_. He says just as much to Taemin, who rolls his eyes and swings the car door shut behind him.

 _Somewhere no one will bother to look for us_ , he says, slowly, like Donghyuck’s an idiot, and he walks off to the entrance of the diner without locking his car. _This is it,_ Donghyuck thinks, _I’m going to have an aneurysm._

Despite his flippancy, Taemin’s not wrong. The diner is desolate, ghostlit, the few regulars and staff decorating the place averaging above the age of sixty-five. Everyone seems to be content to loiter over the newspaper and their cooling cups of coffee. Two men sitting at the bar, faces sunken and cracked like dried river clay, bicker over the weather and if it’s still warm enough for fishing. An elderly woman fiddles with a jukebox that Donghyuck is certain does not work. 

Taemin strides past them all, sits himself down in a squeaking vinyl booth, and no one spares the two of them a single glance. It feels a little something like the Twilight Zone, he muses, sliding into the seat across from Taemin, and he won’t say it and give Taemin the satisfaction, but maybe not being stared at is a small relief.

Donghyuck fiddles with his watch, the hems of his sleeves. He can’t stand it anymore and he blurts out, “Why didn’t you lock your car?”

Taemin raises an eyebrow, but continues to inspect the menu with an air of performance that gives Donghyuck the inkling that he probably already knows it back to back. “I grew up around here,” He says. “No one will steal from me.” He looks up and tilts his head, and Donghyuck can maybe understand how the nation fell in love with him, just a little. “And even if they did,” Taemin continues, flipping through the laminated pages. “I hate that fucking car. They can have it.” Donghyuck snorts in response, and Taemin asks if he was raised in a barn.

A weathered old woman comes to pour their coffee, sweat on her brow and breath smelling like brown liqour. They both reach for the cinnamon at the same time. They both like the taste in coffee. 

“Look,” Taemin says, stirring specks of cinnamon into his drink with a silver spoon, and Donghyuck stares at how beautiful-sharp his cheekbones look under the fluorescents, how etheral he looks swiping at the condensation on his water glass with slender white fingers. “I don’t like you. You know this, and it doesn’t matter why.” Donghyuck has never met a more convincing liar, but Donghyuck _is_ him, the worst of him, and he sees the un-truth hiding in the strain of his pink-lipped smile. 

_Either you don’t hate me_ , Donghyuck thinks, taking a large gulp of his coffee to escape the press of Taemin’s gaze, _or it really does matter to you._

Taemin sits unflinchingly, eyes dark and shiny and unblinking, “Our first international tour dates will be announced tonight.” He sips at his drink and revels in the pinpricks of confusion that slip through Donghyuck’s carefully curated air of polite boredom. “They didn’t tell you because you’re not important enough to tell, obviously,” he continues. “But I thought I’d be a good hyung and give you some advice, keep you from embarrassing the rest of us.”

Donghyuck grips the handle of his mug so hard his fingers ache with the strain. So _now_ he wants to play the part of big brother, “You do know that I’ve been to America before, right _hyung_ ?” He continues, tight-lipped and voice serrated, “And in case you've forgotten, I’ve been in this business since I was thirteen. I don’t think _I’m_ the one you should be worrying about.”

If the dig gets to Taemin he doesn’t show it, just smiles all celebrity-slick and brazen, and his teeth are so white Donghyuck wants to punch them down his throat. “You stupid boy,” He says, still smiling. Donghyuck is struck silent by the chill in his voice, still lark-song pretty but frozen dead. “I’ve been singing longer than you’ve been alive and you’re still as green as any of them. Sit down and show some _fucking_ respect.” Donghyuck clenches his fists to keep them from trembling. They are both silent, watching, waiting. Taemin breaks the tension first, suddenly leaning back against the booth, as if deflated. He rakes a hand through his hair and murmurs something that sounds suspiciously close to _god I need a fucking cigarette_. 

“Let me do this for you, Donghyuck,” He says quietly. His eyes are still closed, head tilted to the sky. “Let me tell you how to survive the next ten years of your life.” He looks older than Donghyuck ever thought he could, weary and venerable. He looks like some hardened war-time general, so very tired, instead of the marble-faced Taemin with the wicked voice and golden halo, instead of the Taemin that Donghyuck knows. 

Maybe it’s because of that, maybe it’s because Taemin used his name, his real name, not _Haechan_ or _boy_ or _silver-tongue_ but _Donghyuck,_ as in him, as in the person and not the image, _Lee Donghyuck_. He places a slow, tentative hand on Taemin’s forearm and waits for him to continue. “Then tell me.”

Taemin snaps open his eyes and tells him, slowly and methodically, rules Donghyuck doesn’t think he’ll ever forget:

 _Comb your hair and slick it back_. _Do up all the buttons on your white shirt and shine your shoes and learn how not to want more than you’re given. Once they make you into something that’s not a good boy, a nice boy, you can’t come back from it. Be careful of who you fuck and more careful of who you trust. Be sharp and be clever and for the love of god,_ he says, _don’t fall in love._

The waitress ambles over with their food in hand, cold eggs over stale toast even though Donghyuck ordered pancakes, and the silence overtakes them as they eat. Everything he swallows feels like cotton in his stomach, this make-believe food in this play-pretend American Diner across the table from some dreamed-up idol with a starfire-smile. He puts his fork down on the plate and studies Taemin, who’s buttering his toast without a care in the world.

Taemin looks up, as if he was waiting, and grins with a gaze that would stare down the barrel of a gun, tongue poised for questions he knows Donghyuck can’t answer. “What’s wrong, silver-tongue? Scared?” 

_I don’t know how to be anything but scared. Tired. Starved like frost-bellied wolves in winter. I don’t know. I am always afraid._

He wonders if Taemin doesn’t like it here either, where life is numbing but endurable, where he can build a life indescribably sad but survivable. If that’s why he took Donghyuck to the bright little wasteland where he grew up to warn him off.

It’s too little and too late, for both of them.

He continues to look at the man in front of him. Dust motes float silently in the dappled morning light. His eyes are sharp, drawn, waiting; he is Michelangelo’s David sculpted in half-flesh half-granite. The stylists hadn’t used enough toner on Taemin’s hair and it’s run yellow. Butternut-squash-in-the-summer kinda ripe. It softens the marble planes, the knife-point beauty of him, he thinks. “Nah,” Donghyuck smiles easily, and he is afraid, but not enough to go down without a fight.

_I’m sure you remember, I was on the phone with you, sweetheart._


	3. can't know what you've always had

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _3_   
>  _History repeats itself. Somebody says this.  
>  History throws its shadow over the beginning, over the desktop,  
> over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters.  
> History is a little man in a brown suit  
> trying to define a room he is outside of.  
> I know history. There are many names in history  
> but none of them are ours._

_3_

_History repeats itself._

_Somebody says this._

Donghyuck is listening to the radio when Shinee’s _Juliet_ starts to play. _Let me tell you a story_ , the radio says. The first love of Taemin’s life, the biggest and strongest and bestest love of his life, the kind that people write in the stars and talk about in the stories, was a boy. This boy was beautiful, that rare, peculiar beautiful that goes past the slope of his jawbone and rests in his soul-- in his clear eyes and the gentle gravity of his presence and the songs tumbling from his mouth like water from the brook. Taemin loved him, _loved_ him, like how old gods love the mountain tops and angels love the weary and blood loves bone. Taemin loved him and he left too soon, with Judas bruising around his lungs from the smoke. He died believing he wasn’t enough. He died not knowing how gentle Taemin looks when he talks about the memory of him. He died alone. 

_What a tiny kind of tragedy,_ the radio says, _how very unfortunate for our star-crossed lovers. Next up in the queue for this evening is NCT Dream’s My First and Last. Let me tell you a story. The first love of Donghyuck’s life--_

Donghyuck turns off the radio and mouths a silent prayer. 

Out of nowhere he feels suddenly, extraordinarily heavy, a sinner trapped in the church of his heaving body. _I need to get out_ , he panics, and it’s a foolish thought, because there is nowhere to go. But he has to try. He creeps barefoot across the cold floor and into Mark’s room, sighing in relief when he sees the outline of Mark’s figure even-breathing and still asleep. The sun rises on the far horizon, and as Donghyuck slides under the covers beside Mark, some faded memory from an aching youth stirs awake. He sleepily gazes at the sharp angles of Mark’s features, the cut glass shards of him that remain even in sleep.

_Do you remember when we went running through the wet lush summer of the arboretum?_

_Do you remember how we glowed golden in highnoon, how we danced and laughed and thought we’d never be this happy again?_

_Do you remember how I kissed you goodnight in the doorway to your room after you made sure no one could see?_

_I do._

_I remember, even if I don’t know what I want._ All he knows is that no one is there at eight am when he reaches for the vacant side of the bed.

_History throws its shadow over the beginning, over the desktop,_

_over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters._

The nights are longer now. 

The nights are longer and so are the practices and the photoshoots and the special stages and Donghyuck feels as though his body has forgotten how to sleep. Hyojin increasingly scolds him for the lilac purpling the bags under his eyes, he grits his teeth and doesn’t ask how he's supposed to sleep when his heart kindles like birch-bark, aches like an open wound.

He can’t sleep so he plays the piano in the common room; he plays Bach and watches Kai and Baekhyun leave for the clubs. Kai has all his rings on and Baekhyun already smells like weed. He plays Debussy and watches Mark and Lucas stumble through the door, stinking of top-shelf whiskey. Mark is drunk enough to twirl a curl of Donghyuck’s hair around his finger as he walks by. He plays Joplin and watches Taemin light a cigarette on the balcony. He smiles at Donghyuck when he comes back in, and leans against the arm of the couch to listen to the rest of the piece. After he leaves, Donghyuck makes a note to play that song for him again sometime. 

He is alone and he is lonely too.

One night, high out of his mind and speech spun slurry, Baekhyun calls him. “ _Taeyeon,_ ” Is the first thing Donghyuck hears when he presses the phone to his ear. “ _Taeyeonnie,_ ” Baekhyun mumbles, and Donghyuck hurts for him. _I’m sorry I left,_ Baekhyun says _, I’m sorry you’re not here and I’m sorry I love you still_. He pauses. The speakers crinkle with static. _I’m sorry for calling, but sometimes, I see your face in the smoke_ , there is the hitch of breath before a sob and Donghyuck hangs up.

Partly to spare them both dignity in the morning. Partly because there’s nothing for him to say. He understands, though, this feeling, and he also understands that there are no words that can wash away the past rotting away under your fingernails. Regret is only a word, but it’s a carmine word, a smear of what’s left after the crush of cochineal, and it doesn’t scrub away easy.

Donghyuck restarts his piece on the piano. Not Beethoven this time, but Mark’s favorite song. He’d strum on his acoustic while Donghyuck sang about hell on earth holy beyond compare. It was in English, and sometimes he’d mess up the pronunciation, but it made Mark happy, so he’d sing it and fumble, every time. He plays softly. There’s a ghost in the room somewhere, but he doesn’t know who it belongs to.

 _I am alone_ , Donghyuck thinks later that night, when the sun is rising among the skyscrapers and Mark is a whiskey-stained heat at his back, _but I feel a little less lonely with you, and that will be enough._

The ghost in the corner doesn’t answer.

_History is a little man in a brown suit_

_trying to define a room he is outside of._

What a vicious history, what the two of them share.

The first time Mark kissed him was in March-- the first bloom of spring. Mark had wide eyes and a silly perm and Donghyuck was clutching the end of a hoverboard in one clenched fist. It felt like summer orange slices, like the first time riding a bike, like the feeding of a hunger he didn’t know was there. Mark at sixteen had chapped lips and bony shoulders and Donghyuck was fascinated by the first sight of him. 

Mark kisses him and he feels a little freer.

Freedom is nice on his tongue, so is the taste of Mark blushing cool pink in the little secret corners that they make for themselves, but they still fought, maybe too much. Donghyuck had such a fragile heart and Mark had such fragile pride and good lord, do boys like them know how to use words as wooden clubs. 

They both had too much anchoring them, too much anger and too much to lose. Mark fought this with self-isolation, Donghyuck went kicking and screaming, and one can imagine how little they understood the other.

There were starlings trapped in Donghyuck’s belly and squalling to be freed. Scrabbling at his flesh. Beating at the cage of his ribs. A weight that was nothing but black-bodied echoes, a heaviness that threatens the blood and substance of him: a heaviness that breeds within the dizziness and fever and the salt of his tears and sweat and skin. Threatened the fragile house of cards of the image he’s made himself up to be.

Looking back, Mark probably had the birds in him too, the apathy and anger they bring. They didn’t talk about it. You don’t talk about despair, not when you’re supposed to be famous, that’s probably what they were thinking back then. 

He still feels heavy like this sometimes, and it used to make Mark frustrated, and maybe it still does, but he’s better at hiding it now. _No one can ever figure out what you want and you won’t ever tell them!_ Mark used to howl, and he wasn’t really wrong. Because how do you describe stillness? Slowness? Entropy of being? 

You can’t. You don’t.

Donghyuck would cry when the explanations got all caught up in his throat and then Mark would cry because Donghyuck was crying and they’d each get a rise out of each other so furious they wouldn’t speak for days. 

Eventually, they learned to look back at the mess and pick up the pieces. Donghyuck now knows that learning to love someone is a lot easier than learning how to coexist. They’re both little beasts, you see, demanding little creatures pushing and pulling and screaming-- but Donghyuck learns to give Mark more space and Mark learns to give Donghyuck less, and it’s not perfect compromise, but it’s something.

 _Tell me what you want sweetheart_ , Mark asks as they’re both cocooned under the blankets, and he doesn’t yell it anymore. If Donghyuck catches him on the right day, Mark can be something near peach-skin tender, maybe even gentle, at his best.

 _There are so many things I can’t tell you_ , Donghyuck thinks. _Kiss me_ , he demands instead. Mark laughs, and does just that.

It’s the chance to be a little freer. It’s a compromise. It’s something, alright.

_I know history. There are many names in history_

_but none of them are ours._

All of Mark’s lyrics are about ill-fated heroes, love indistinguishable from tragedy, about returning to a place, any place, as long as it isn’t here. Mark doesn’t try to publish these lyrics and Donghyuck knows that even if he wanted to, he couldn’t. 

He knows everything about Mark, the old kind of hunger that pierces his flesh like fish hooks, the weariness he swallows as sacrament, his penchant for Lucky Strikes when he's stressed and green tea when he's not.

Whenever Mark’s in a good mood he cracks the door to his room open, a silent invitation that Donghyuck always accepts. He lets himself in, clicking the door shut behind him. Mark’s back is towards him, figure hunched over a black leather notebook and scribbling furiously. He’s messy-haired, bare-legged, nearly glowing under the honey gold light of dusk that creeps through the blinds. Donghyuck smiles in spite of himself, drapes himself over Mark’s shoulders and revels in the way he stiffens in surprise. 

“ _Jesus_ , Hyuckie,” Mark startles. Donghyuck laughs, hands still braced on each side of Mark’s shoulders, _he’s still so prickly, so fun to rile up, even after all this time._

“What’cha writing about,” Donghyuck teases, leaning down to settle his chin on the crown of Mark’s head. “About me?”

Mark grabs the hand residing on his left shoulder, brings it to his mouth and kisses every knuckle. Mark says that Donghyuck has pretty hands, that he likes them best when Donghyuck’s playing the piano, chewed fingernails and delicate tendons skating over the ivories. Mark moves to press his warm, chapped lips against the stuttering pulse of his wrist and Donghyuck suppresses a shiver. It’s Mark’s turn to gloat, pleased, “Always,” he says. 

He cocks his head to look at Donghyuck over his shoulder, and it’s not the burnished-red heat in his eyes so much as it’s the affection in them that strikes him through the ribs. “It’s always you,” Mark says, and he bites his lip down on a sly smile as he pulls Donghyuck into his lap.

 _You make me feel terrible things_ , Donghyuck thinks dizzily, as Mark presses a red bruise into the hollow of his neck with his tongue and teeth, _your touch strikes a match and burns me clean._


	4. build me a pyre of your body

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _4  
>  He had green eyes,  
> so I wanted to sleep with him—  
> green eyes flecked with yellow, dried leaves on the surface of a pool-  
> You could drown in those eyes, I said.  
> The fact of his pulse,  
> the way he pulled his body in, out of shyness or shame or a desire  
> not to disturb the air around him.  
> Everyone could see the way his muscles worked,  
> the way we look like animals,  
> his skin barely keeping him inside.  
> I wanted to take him home  
> and rough him up and get my hands inside him, drive my body into his  
> like a crash test car.  
> I wanted to be wanted and he was  
> very beautiful, kissed with his eyes closed, and only felt good while moving.  
> You could drown in those eyes, I said,  
> so it’s summer, so it’s suicide,  
> so we’re helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool._

_4_

_He had green eyes,_

_so I wanted to sleep with him—_

_green eyes flecked with yellow, dried leaves on the surface of a pool-_

_You could drown in those eyes, I said._

Mark fucks filthy. Mark likes to pull his hair. Mark likes having his cock sucked sloppy. When his eyes cloud over and pupils ring dark, Mark likes to call him _baby_. He fucks like he means it, but also like he doesn’t. _It’s hard to explain_ , Donghyuck thinks, but that’s the nature of him too, inexplicable.

Most of all, Mark likes the upper-hand, the iron grip of control, likes to see Donghyuck get on his knees and kiss the ring. _A power lust, an ego trip,_ Donghyuck thinks, _it_ _always is with him_.

They’ve just finished their largest show yet, a stage in LA so frothing in energy and noise that the echoes of it ring in his ears still. Incendiary and full of light so bright he can almost feel the burn of it. It’s late enough that the staff and stage crew are long gone-- the audience having filed single-file and singing out the stadium long ago. He’s managed to catch his breath, but the blade-teeth of adrenaline are still sinking into his skin; the flickering lights and leering shadows of the backstage after-hours further press against his matchstick nerves.

He stands alone backstage. Him and the vastness of gunpowder-colored space.

It felt too cramped in the lead up to the show--too many people with too many places to be--but now, empty, dark, it’s too big, too thunderously heavy. _Just stay put for a moment_ , his manager had told him. _Taeyong re-fractured one of his fingers and I need to take him to get it set._

It is far too cold here. A breeze tickles the back of his neck. He doesn’t feel like he’s alone.

His skin prickles under his thin scarlet blazer, a cutting low to his stomach and held together by a tight gilded belt at the waist. _Stay put_ , his manager has said _, and we’ll send someone back to pick you up_ \-- He shivers violently in the damp air.

 _There’s nothing wrong here_ , he thinks. The speakers and the mics and the props and the firecracker LEDS are exactly where they were when the lights and the people were here. _Nothing has changed_ , he tells himself, _it’s only little darker_.

He’s only unsettled, that’s all. By the way shapes shift in the sinking corners of the rooms. By the hallways that don’t seem to end. By the silence that is too thick and brimming to truly be silence. He doesn’t feel like he’s alone.

Some small seed of instinct in the back of his brain wants to run. He wants to run away like an animal and never look back. _This is crazy_ , he thinks, even as he automatically reaches for his phone to call for an Uber, _This is stupid and insane and you’re going to get in trouble._

His hands meet nothing. His tight suit pants, a frothing red like let-blood, don’t even have pockets. His manager still has his phone. There is no one here to give him a ride but he _still doesn’t feel like he’s alone._

A bead of sweat slithers slowly down the back of his neck. _I need to find the dressing room,_ he tells himself. He picks a direction and books it as fast as he can. The silence gets thick as smoke-signal, so loud it rings in his ears. _It’s the adrenaline_ , he tells himself. _It’s the caffeine. It’s the nicotine running through your blood and the anxiety shaking the foundation of your bones._

It might be nothing. And yet, he runs.

At the end of one long hallway he stumbles onto his dressing room. A prim white door with a paper taped to it that says _Haechan_. He throws himself into the room, slams the door shut, and flips on the lights. He tries to breathe and it emerges a gasp. His hand comes up to grasp his throat, to loosen whatever invisible whisper is choking him, and it gets snagged in the gossamer threads of gold chains and the collar of the sheer, gauzy burgundy shirt tightened around his neck.

He feels outside of himself. Like he maybe just decided to stop inhabiting his body, with it’s flaws and it’s vertigo and choking fear. He’s floating, and suddenly he’s looking down at this frightened boy clothed in a color red so rich it’s brutal. 

_Is that me?_

The blurry feeling of non-being is broken by three sharp _raps_ to the door, loud as a gunshot in the dead of night. Donghyuck chokes out a little noise that to his own ears sounds more animal than human, and he curls into himself on the vanity chair.

The door swings open with a slam, and the sight of the shadowed, faceless figure behind it causes him to bite his tongue so hard he bleeds. He closes his eyes.

“Baby?” He blinks his eyes open at the word, and the stranger steps into the dim light of the dressing room. 

_Mark._

It’s him. All the slick jet hair, glasses hiding the midnight smudge of his eyeliner, stiff-backed posture of him. Donghyuck breathes a sigh of relief so shuddering it feels like it bruises his ribs. 

_Mark is here and I’ll be okay._

“What’s wrong with you?” His voice is light, but he approaches Donghyuck carefully, as one would approach stray animals in back alleys. Like if he moves too fast he’ll get bitten.

What can he even say? _Mark-hyung I’m afraid of the noises and the silence and the dark. I’m afraid that I am alone and also not._ How idiotic.

It’s silly, he knows, to be acting in a way that causes Mark to treat him this delicately, but nevertheless his voice trembles when he speaks, “You all _left_ me here!” He’s ashamed of the tears welling in his eyes. He is horribly, cloyingly ashamed, and so _so_ relieved. He sniffs, “You selfish, thick-headed bastards _left me here_ without a phone or my clothes or a ride back-- in the dark.”

Donghyuck doesn’t like the dark. It’s too much and too little of everything. Muddles his senses. 

He lays a firm hand on Donghyuck’s shaking thigh, lets his fingers dig into the flesh in a way Donghhyuck finds grounding. “I’m sorry, Duckie,” he whispers, and he must feel really bad because his other hand comes up to cup the back of Donghyuck’s head, threading through the hairspray-stiffened mass of curls. “The others and I were going out to get dinner to celebrate, some drinks,” the hand on his thigh squeezes, comforting and hungry at equal turns. “We thought you and ‘Yong were in the other car.”

He leans forward, tilts his head like he does whenever he’s too shy to ask for a kiss. “I’m a selfish, thick-headed bastard,” he agrees, hand slowly moving from the back of Donghyuck’s head to cup his cheek, swiping away a single, fat teardrop tinged black with mascara. “But I’m a bastard that came back for you.”

Donghyuck chases the distance between them, their lips only briefly clashing before Mark leans back. “Why--” Donghyuck says, voice already slurry.

Mark twirls a finger around the gold hoop in Donghyuck’s ear, thoughtful. “Let me make it up to you, baby,” he grins and it’s _wicked_. He looks around the room casually, “Even right here if you want. The driver out front’s not going anywhere.” It’s a seductive thought, Mark pushing him against the wall of the dressing room and sinking to his knees.

“You’re crazy,” he says. 

“You let me get away with it,” Mark responds, “So who’s the crazy one?”

It’s a seductive thought, but he is still cold and tired and riddled with the feeling of nausea from being trapped in a space too vast and dark. When Donghyuck gives his answer, _Take me home Mark, take us home_ , Mark smiles. His gaze is dark, depthless, pupils dilated and expression unreadable.

Uncontainable. Unknowable. Un-wild.

Whenever Mark gets that look in his eyes, Donghyuck knows how the night is going to end-- quivering, buried deep in the bedsheets with Mark working him over till he can’t remember his own name. He stands up to grab his bag hanging on a nearby rack, and when he turns around Mark is only centimeters away. Donghyuck leans in and this time Mark doesn’t move away.

Mark tightens the noose of his arms around Dognhyuck’s ribs and calls it an embrace. He bares his teeth into Mark’s parted mouth and calls it a smile. They share spit sullied with blood spilled from the bite in his tongue, and call it a kiss.

_The fact of his pulse,_

_the way he pulled his body in, out of shyness or shame or a desire_

_not to disturb the air around him._

It’s a long, silent drive back to their hotel.

Donghyuck busies himself with drawing circles on Mark’s thigh, inching higher and higher with every red stoplight. Mark is pretending to ignore him, tapping away at some game on his phone that he’s not very good at. The way he stiffens every time Donghyuck’s touch grazes too hard, too high, that betrays him. 

The driver is pulling up to their hotel when Donghyuck decides to be mean-- Mark reaches up to pull his hood over his face and Donghyuck seizes his chance, drifts a hand up to the semi covered by Mark’s jeans. He presses firm and all at once, and Mark arches his back-- lets out a breathy little sound somewhere between a choke and a moan. He unbuckles his seatbelt and shoves Donghyuck back into his seat with the other arm. “You’re gonna get yourself into trouble,” Mark hisses.

Donghyuck blinks up at him, through a mess of dried tears and a trail of glittering silver eyeshadow smeared on his cheeks, “Promise?”

Mark swears vehemently under his breath, thanks the company driver and tips him for his silence, and hauls Donghyuck out of the leather interior of the BMW. 

The two of them stumble over each other as they make their way through the lobby, all marble floors polished to a diamond shine and air that smells like expensive incense and bleach. He loves California, its opulence and spotless blue swimming pools.

As Mark hurries him into the elevators, thankfully empty this late at night, Donghyuck wonders what kind of sight they would make, if someone did stumble upon the two of them. Two boys-- one in black denim, nikes and the weight of the world on his shoulders, the other in a red silk suit and a tangle of gold and panic wrapped around his throat. 

What a curious pair, they make.

Mark doesn’t kiss him when the elevator doors close, but he sneaks a single hand around the nip of Donghyuck’s waist cinched by the belt, and it’s a promise. The doors shut and they move up. Up and up to the twenty-seventh floor, a penthouse arching and razor-sharp across the stretch of the city. 

Donghyuck sees his face refracted in the glass walls of the elevator, cut and flayed and put back together wrong in the reflection. There’s something nagging at him. “Mark,” he asks quietly. Mark turns to look at him, ruffled hair under his hood, doe eyes, pink switchblade of a mouth. Boyish in a way that shouldn’t hurt him but does. “How long were you...” he struggles to phrase the question in a way that doesn’t make him sound crazy. “When you came back to get me,” he finally decides on. “How long were you there?”

Mark tightens his grip on Donghyuck’s waist. He doesn’t really mind it. “Why?”

“I just want to know.”

Mark sighs, loud and long-suffering, “I went straight to your dressing room. I knew you’d be there, I guess. I don’t know.” He smiles and it doesn’t disguise the odd, brittle look in eyes. “Why does it matter?” The floor dings on twenty-seven. Despite their chome opulence, the doors creak when they pull open. “Why do you ask, Duckie?” He repeats.

“No reason,” Donghyuck replies, biting his tongue and feigning nonchalant. It was nothing then. Just him, the anxiety and the adrenaline, the rush of it all. He lets out a long exhale “No reason at all.” And now he is the one pulling Mark out the door and to the room.

Mark pauses in front of their door, digging through the depths of his big black hoodie for the keycard. Donghyuck, impatient, comes up behind him and lays his chin on Mark’s shoulder, presses his body tight against Mark’s back and reaches a hand to the front pocket of Mark’s jeans. 

Mark arches his back, stifles a little sound under his breath, “Baby what’s gotten _into_ you?”

Donghyuck laughs, plucking the keycard out of Mark’s pocket with clever fingers, for the first time tonight, since he’s put on this red suit, he feels settled. “I’m only trying to help,” he purrs into Mark’s ear, and he snickers when Mark flinches. 

Some things stay the same, even across time.

Mark snatches the card away from him goodnaturedly, and laughs when Donghyuck practically climbs him in order to take it back. He whips his arm out of Donghyuck’s reach and scans it against the door, tugs the both of them tangled together into the hotel room, closing the door and leaning against it.

Mark tucks his nose into the crook of Donghyuck’s neck, barely any space between them, only tired breath and the last tendrils of warm cotton from Donghyuck’s perfume. It’s familiar, the way they weave together. It’s comforting in a way Donghyuck doesn’t remember until he’s back in his embrace. “You were so beautiful today, Donghyuckie.” He slides a hand up the back of Donghyuck’s neck, forceful, a cage and a reminder, “I was talking to Taemin-hyung, and he said that there’s no one else who wears fame like you.”

Donghyuck tucks that piece of information away for later, in case he finds a use for it, and bares his neck further. “And what did you say,” he says quietly, “I only care what you say.” He cares about a lot more, but this is true in the moment.

Mark hums, other hand creeping up to unbuckle the belt holding Donghyuck’s blazer shut. “I said you look like something I shouldn’t be allowed to have.” The hand on the back of his neck pushes, and they’re now forehead to forehead. He shivers under the touch of Mark’s palm, cool on the overheated skin of his nape, and says nothing, out of both spite and the hot press of praise.

It doesn’t stop Mark, who is talking enough for the both of them. “You’re were so good,” Mark croons, breathy like he gets during the filthiest lines of his lyrics. “No one could look away from you, Duckie, the entire stadium was watching just _you_.” 

He feels his face heat against his will, struggles a bit from Mark’s grasp just to feel it get tighter. _God how is this always so good._ “That’s not true,” he says, and Mark knows him well enough to understand it as _keep talking_.

“Oh it is,” he says, placing a hot kiss on his neck under his ear, Donghyuck groans, knocks his head back against the door. Mark chases, nipping his earlobe gently, “I saw the way those front row girls were eyeing you, dancing with those thighs and singing with that mouth.” He swipes a thumb across Donghyuck’s bottom lip, makeup licked off and bitten red, and he opens his mouth on some base, shameless instinct. “I had to practically beat Lucas off with a stick.” 

He considers this for a moment, despite the lightheaded fizz in his brain with Mark against him. Lucas _was_ more handsy than usual--hanging off Donghyuck’s side and toying with the necklaces fastened around his throat--as they stood in a row answering questions awkwardly filtered through an interpreter. “It doesn’t matter,” he drawls, “Because none of them are you.” He licks the tip of Mark’s thumb, still paused at the entrance to his mouth, eyes narrowed.

 _Fuck_ \-- Mark spits, delving his finger deeper into Donghyuck’s mouth. _Fuck,_ Mark repeats, like it was punched out of him. _The things I want to do to that mouth._

Donghyuck, smiles around the finger in his mouth, before lightly grazing his teeth against it. _It’s not enough._ Mark pulls his hand away, Donghyuck letting the finger leave his mouth with an audible _pop_ that echoes in the dark stillness of the entryway. “You can’t just tease me like that,” Mark says. There’s something sweet in his eyes, something sinister. “Dancing for everybody but me.” 

_I’m sorry_ , Donghyuck says, and _God_ does he love this part of the game, _I’m sorry hyung-nim._ Mark rips the golden belt off his waist, throws it someone behind them and quickly following it with Donghyuck’s scarlet suit jacket. He creeps a hand up under the billowing, gauzy burgundy shirt that conceals next to nothing. His hands creep up and up, and when he finds Donghyuck’s nipple, hardened from the night air and the rub of the sheer fabric against it, he _pinches_ hard.

Donghyuck keens, high and loud, _I’m sorry_ , he says for the last time, and he musters enough energy to spin the two of them around, till Mark’s back hits the door. _Tell me what I can do to make it up to you_ , Donghyuck says. He feels so deliciously warm, seafoam light, melting like the core of a newborn star.

Mark leans in to kiss him, though it’s all too much tongue and teeth and slick spit dripping down his chin to truly be called a kiss. Mark bites Donghyuck’s bottom lip as he pulls back, and it hurts so sweetly he wants to cry.

 _I can think of something else for that pretty little mouth to do_ , Mark says, and he repeats the action, kneading the pert nipple between his fingers until Donghyuck’s knees give out beneath him. He let’s himself hit the ground, and the pain of it feels good, utterly real.

He fiddles with Mark’s black leather belt with shaking fingers, and he can already feel his mouth salivating. It’s Mark who eventually reaches down to unbuckle his belt, cupping Donghyuck’s jaw with his other hand. _Do a good job for your hyung_ , Mark says, and his voice is golden as amber, heavy as lead. Donghyuck nods furiously, can barely let out a faint, dulcet sound of agreement.

He mouths the outline of Mark’s cock under his boxers, and revels in the way Mark’s fingers thread through his hair and tug _hard._ “Keep teasing,” Mark murmurs roughly, “And I can get a lot meaner.”

 _Tempting,_ Donghyuck wants to say, but he’s already trembling with anticipation-- and at the core of it Donghyuck has always liked pleasure _right now_ instead of later. He hums his assent, but bites his lip on a smile when he tugs Mark’s boxers down roughly and he hisses. Mark gives him a filthy look, but his expression immediately slacken as Donghyuck gives a firm, slow lick from the base to tip, along the vein where he knows Mark is particularly sensitive.

 _Jesus fucking Christ,_ Mark mutters, and Donghyuck looks up and makes big, teary eyes at Mark as he starts to take the head further back in his throat. _Fuck,_ Mark spits, _Fuck look at you, my pretty baby on his knees sucking my cock, I’m so lucky--_

He’d laugh if his mouth wasn’t so full. Donghyuck knows Mark, knows that to him, the pretty picture is just as important as the feel of it, knows that the best way to wrap him around his finger is to not make it just feel good but _look_ good. He sinks his mouth deeper, tongue working ceaselessly, and pulls back when he chokes. He basks in it for a few second--just enough to really _want_ to breathe, to make him blind through the tears welling in his eyes-- before he pulls back.

He gives gentle, kitten-ish licks to the tip, and Mark strokes the side of his cheek, smearing the gentle drip of tears across his face. Mark looks dazed, like all the bite has been sapped out of him. He’s so beautiful like this, Donghyuck thinks, when he let’s himself go, when he allows himself to feel good. _I can make him feel better_ , Donghyuck decides.

“Mark,” he says, throat sore and voice husky, “I want you to fuck me.” He gives a slow gentle pump to the shaft and bites his lip when he sees Mark practically roll his eyes back into his head. _That’s so fucking hot._ “Please,” he adds, because Mark likes it when he’s polite.

The grip to Mark has in his hair tightens to painful, and the moan he lets out is embarrassing, high-pitched and trembling, but Mark must not care because he’s mumbling under his breath like he can’t hold the words back. _So pretty with your mouth and that wicked tongue and the sounds you make_. He pulls Donghyuck to his feet and holds him tight. He’s trembling, he realizes, and so fucking hard it hurts. 

“Since you asked so nicely,” he says, kissing the corner of his mouth, “And since you’ve been so good for me,” His hands press bruisingly hard into Donghyuck’s hips, throws his head back and lets a low groan escape his mouth as he grinds slow and dirty against Mark’s thigh. “I think my baby should get what he wants.”

It’s not said softly but as a statement, a so very _Mark_ way to say something this filthy-- heated and on the edge of blunt. Donghyuck can only fall deeper into it.

_Everyone could see the way his muscles worked,_

_the way we look like animals,_

_his skin barely keeping him inside._

Mark is leaning back on the bed, horribly, terribly amused as he watches Donghyuck try to peel himself out of his tight suit pants. “You okay over there?” He asks, and Donghyuck only flips him off in response, cheeks flushing.

 _Cute_ , Mark smiles, _my Donghyuck is such a cutie_.

He finally manages to extricate himself from his own pants and he scowls, sticks his tongue out at Mark in a face he is certain is not cute at all. He goes to reach for his neck-- the buttons and lace trimming of a billowing, delicately embroidered sheer top, tangled with the intricate gold chains knotted around his neck.

“Keep the shirt on,” Mark demands softly. “The jewelry too.”

Donghyuck slowly unfirls a smug, smug grin, and Mark rolls his eyes and collapses back into the pillows. “You like this,” Donghyuck says, half a question. “Mark— _hyung-nim_ ,” he coos as greasily as possible. “Do you like having me made up pretty?” He slowly steps forward, shimmying out of his briefs--those too, red--and hands toying with the hem of the shirt that flows around his upper thighs. “Your own personal idol to play with?” 

“You’re shameless,” Mark murmurs, flushed, which means he’s right.

“I’m yours,” Donghyuck replies, which makes Mark fall silent.

He climbs onto the bed, crawls towards where Mark lies, naked and unashamed, on all fours. He settles himself across Mark’s lap, effortless as two puzzle pieces clicking together, and feels tension bleed out of him, easy as the drip of molasses in damp summer.

He closes his eyes, lazily grinds against Mark's lap as Mark slowly and methodically coats his fingers in lube grabbed from the nightstand drawer. “I never get tired of this,” Donghyuck whispers, leaving open-mouthed kisses against Mark’s neck. “How do I never get tired of this.”

Mark doesn’t answer, but captures his mouth in a long, spit-slicked kiss-- a whiskey on fire, molotov-cocktail kinda kiss with too many teeth, that fries you like a live-wire. He slides a cool, slick hand under Donghyuck’s shirt and swallows a moan has he sinks one long finger into him. It’s too much-- it feels like too much with the heat of Mark’s mouth on his tongue and the filthy press of his hips and the gentle slide of his shirt as it shifts over his overheated skin. It’s too much-- but it’s _too good._

He cries out into into Mark’s mouth, who just takes and takes and takes everything Donghyuck has to offer him. He presses a second finger in alongside the first, and Donghyuck can’t take he _can’t_ , he thumps his head onto Mark’s shoulder-- goes limp and pliant. The rough, rhythmic push and pull of his fingers punches little moans out of him, the burn morphing from a white-hot sting to a delicious ache that just... fills him. 

“Yes, yes, _fuck_ that’s it-- _God_ Mark you know just how to break me.” He’s rambling now, as Mark scissors him open, other hand reaching up to give a harsh jerk to one of his nipples. He keens, babbles absolute nonsense as he bites red hickies into Mark’s neck to ground him against being completely unraveled. “I dream about this _god_ Mark I _do_.” He cries out as Mark slips a third finger in, fast and merciless. “Every time I fuck myself on my fingers I imagine their yours,” he says, and God, how unfair is it that Mark can fingerfuck the honesty out of him. 

_Shut up,_ he tells himself dizzily, _shut the fuck up right now._

Mark laughs, thick and wine-dark, a low rasp of a thing. “I know baby,” he says. “I know I give it to you good, and the walls at the dorms are _very_ thin, aren’t they?” Donghyuck flushes, from cheeks to chest, embarrassed, but Mark’s fingers push back into him and he loses himself in it, digs his nails into the meat of Mark’s shoulders.

Mark hisses with the cut of pain, and Donghyuck digs his nails deeper. Mark gets his revenge by curling his fingers _just so_ , against that special spot, and Donghyuck lets out a moan so loud it verges on a scream.

He’s getting used to the stretch, grinding back on Mark’s fingers, but it’s still not enough. “Faster,” he begs. “C’mon Mark _faster_ , give it to me _harder_ , is this what makes every groupie soak her panties?” Mark gives a particularly vicious push and curl motion of his fingers, and Donghyuck makes a woozy, fucked-out kind of gurgle. _Almost_. 

“I said _harder_ , Mark, don’t make me get up and go see if _Lucas_ will fuck me better than--”

He doesn’t get to finish the sentence. Mark takes his other hand and spreads Donghyuck’s thighs wider, so spread out he aches with the stretch of it, then ruthlessly drives all three of his fingers back in, too much and all at once. He practically sobs, vision blurring at the edges, and Mark twists his hand, left and then right. 

He’s panting wetly against Mark’s shoulder, can feel it building and _building_ , some great and blistering heat that wracks his body with tremors. Mark gives one last brutal _curl_ of his fingers, hitting dead-center on that sweet little soft spot inside him. Mark raises the hand spreading apart Donghyuck’s legs and brings it down with a resounding _smack_ on the meat of his thigh, clawing at the flesh that wobbles and-- _There it is_ , that heat, that fall. A broken scream reverberates through the room, and Donghyuck, still blinking white spots out of his vision, realizes that it was from him.

He looks up from Mark’s shoulder, still feeling all wobbly and shivery, and _oh--_ he’s pretty, so pretty. Korea’s golden boy has his arms tight around Donghyuck, slick hands struggling to gain purchase on Donghyuck’s back, hair sweat-slicked and pale skin marred with bruises and the rosy blush of exertion. He’s still achingly hard between the two of them, coated in the mess covering Donghyuck’s shirt from his own release. 

He decides immediately, what he wants. “Fuck me,” he pants roughly, still dizzy from the aftershocks of his orgasm. 

Mark looks up, sweet mouth open in surprise. “You just--”

“I don’t care,” he says abruptly. “I want to feel it, I want you to bend me in half. I want you to make me come again and I want you to fuck me through it.”

“Shameless,” Mark chides, for the second time that night, but he’s already pushing Donghyuck to the bed and reaching for a condom. 

Donghyuck is flexible, almost absurdly so, and Mark has little trouble moving his legs to rest over his shoulders, he only feels the ghost of a twinge from the overuse of his muscles. Mark presses into him fully with slow, easy movement, lets out a strangled, wide-eyed moan. Donghyuck, flushed and dazed with his legs pressed to his chest gasps, wiggles from the chafe of the over-stimulation, but finds nowhere to go in the cage of Mark’s arms. He takes a deep breath, lets the burn and the stretch wash over him, get him numb in a way that makes his limbs and stomach and dick feel heavy. He licks messy on the bruises bitten into Mark’s shoulders and wraps his arms around his neck.

Mark lets out a string of incoherent curses as he fucks into him, fast and sloppy, and Donghyuck tunes into him slurring absolute _filth_ in his ears. _Fuck feels so good_ , he murmurs _, so tight and hot wrapped around me just like that. Wanted to bend you over since you came out of that dressing room in that slutty fucking shirt_. Donghyuck cries out, feels the tremors shaking his body grow stronger and stronger, does his best to push himself up onto Mark’s cock with every thrust. Mark keeps going, thrusts getting harder and more erratic.

 _I’m going to die_ , Donghyuck thinks, second orgasm building in his gut so rapidly it hurts, _he’s gonna fuck me to death and I’m going to break in half._

 _I wanted to twist those gold chains around your neck and collar you with it,_ Mark mutters, voice hoarse and breath shallow.

 _Then do it_ , Donghyuck spits, release burning hot and angry through him like wildfire. _Do it you fucking coward._

Mark shifts his weight to one forearm and grabs the delicate chains around Donghyuck’s neck and _pulls._ He chokes out a breath and succumbs to a blistering tremble of stars, clenching vice-like around the length of Mark inside him. Mark’s hips start stuttering, and Donghyuck groans, mewls really, at the feeling of Mark pulsing and shuddering through his release.

Mark rolls away to toss the condom, and comes back to lie next to Donghyuck, neither of them willing or able to move from the sweat and cum damp cling of the sheets. After what feels like hours, Donghyuck breaks the silence. “I think my ears are ringing,” he says. Mark laughs, throwing his head back against the pillows. _Lovely_ , he thinks. “No really,” he continues. “I think you broke my brain. I had one braincell left and you fucked it to death.”

Mark keeps laughing, husky and quiet and fucked out, and reaches over to pull him into a kiss. A softer one this time, that in Mark language means _hey, you alright?_ Donghyuck sighs into it, presses back in a way Mark knows means _yes._

“I feel gross,” he announces, which is very much true. The gauzy and luxurious cloth of his shirt didn’t survive, it’s ripped in some places and sweat-stained in most. The jewelry hanging from his ears and neck feels like too much stimulation, too jangly and cold and scraping, he wants it off. 

And Mark is looking at him strangely; open, vulnerable, in a way he never is with Donghyuck anymore.

He doesn’t know what to do with it, so he kisses Mark again on the curve of his mouth and turns to move away, shimmying off the bed and wobbling rubber-legged to the attached bathroom. He doesn’t look back as he leaves. 

He doesn’t know what he’ll find in Mark’s expression, isn’t sure if he wants to know. 

_I wanted to take him home_

_and rough him up and get my hands inside him, drive my body into his_

_like a crash test car._

He’s sitting on the porcelain tile of the shower floor, head on his knees. 

The water runs scorching and clear over his body. He crosses his arms across his naked torso and imagines what it would be like to feel clean. He imagines how it would feel for the rivulets of water to run through his skin and fill him up, fill up the golden and hollow place inside him. He skates a bar of honey-milk soap across his body, and shuts his eyes. He imagines that Mark, this shrike of a boy, would love him even if he had a heart instead of a thicket of thorns.

Imagining is not how you learn to love yourself, but Donghyuck tries anyway.

_I wanted to be wanted and he was_

_very beautiful, kissed with his eyes closed, and only felt good while moving._

_I was sad to be born_ , Mark had told him once, _because there’s never been a time I haven’t hungered. Because it means that I’ll die. That you will too._ His own cattle-brand of pillowtalk.

 _Good luck with that,_ Donghyuck had said, gliding a hand over the skin of Mark’s naked back, _because honey I’m gonna be a song that never dies._

 _You will_ , Mark said, catching Donghyuck’s hand in his, gripping tight. _By God you will._

Maybe Mark was right. Maybe the best of them was to be found at the bottom of the valley, before all of this.

Maybe all good things die, just a little bit. Because even heaven burns, when God gets too hungry.

Maybe he just needs to go back to sleep.

_You could drown in those eyes, I said,_

_so it’s summer, so it’s suicide,_

_so we’re helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool._

He creeps back to bed, careful and quiet as a lamb, and he sighs when he finds Mark already asleep, arm thrown across Donghyuck’s pillow and sheet pulled down to expose the expanse of his chest.

He’s frowning in his sleep, mumbling frantically in his sleep. He hasn’t done since they were trainees. It worries him, in some deep and unknowable way. He thinks about a phrase he found that scrawled on page of one of Mark’s notebooks, once. _I know we are cut from a cold place_ , _but spilled blood is the mark of the holy._ And oh, if Mark is not a blood-let idol, who is.

He looks at the bruises that pattern Mark’s throat, spilling down to his chest and shoulders. The rest of the passage said _and bruises are the mark of the faithful_.

Donghyuck suddenly feels achingly, unbearably fond. _Oh you_ , he thinks, gently running a knuckle across the slope of Mark’s cheekbone. _You and those amber-rum eyes and the grit of your voice and how the sharp of your teeth cuts to the marrow of me._

Mark shifts, and Donghyuck stills the hand running across his cheek. What would he say if Mark awoke. _Stay, please, just for tonight_ , he would plead. _You’re the only home I have_.

Mark doesn’t wake up. Donghyuck settles next to him, clinging to every breadth of skin he can find.

When he blinks awake to the first light of morning, Mark is already gone.


	5. la dolce vita

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 5  
> It wasn’t until we were well past the middle of it  
> that we realized  
> the old dull pain, whose stitched wrists and clammy fingers,  
> far from being subverted,  
> had only slipped underneath us, freshly scrubbed.
> 
> Mirrors and shop windows returned our faces to us,  
> replete with the tight lips and the eyes that remained eyes  
> and not the doorways we had hoped for.  
> His wounds healed, the skin a bit thicker than before,  
> scars like train tracks on his arms and on his body underneath his shirt.

_5_

_It wasn’t until we were well past the middle of it_

_that we realized_

Los Angeles is a lot uglier under the light of day.

That’s what he thinks rolling out of bed, alone and marked up lilac with bruises, eyes straining to take in the lines of the slumbering city underneath a blanket of morning smog. 

He checks the side table. Six am. Mark is gone. The other side of the bed is still warm.

This isn’t unusual-- Mark is an early-riser, a go-getter, committed to what Lucas calls the _rise and grind,_ whatever that means. Donghyuck can’t remember the last time Mark allowed himself to sleep in past ten in the morning, gangly teenage limbs thrown over Donghyuck’s torso and snoring softly. It’s been years.

He sits up in a slump of white sheets and creaking joints-- squinting through the light sneaking its fingers through the blinds. 

Yesterday--the way the air shimmered with heat in the SoFi as people screamed his name, the way he ran with the naked fear of an animal through the dark in red silk, the way Mark felt hot and solid against him, _in him--_ it seems like a dream, fuzzy and warped in the way of a desert mirage. 

A trickle of lights and sound makes it’s way through the crack in the bedroom door. Blearily, Donghyuck makes out voices, a hushed frenzy of whispers fraught with the quiet irritation of an argument before dawn. He’s always had a bad habit of eavesdropping, something he’s done his best to grow out of, but greedy curiosity nags at him until he gets out of bed, throwing on one of Mark’s oversize button-downs before creeping closer to the crack in the door. If there’s one thing Donghyuck’s missing, it’s shame. Or shame and half a heart, if you listen to Mark.

“How could you do this?” It’s Taemin’s voice, which is strange, considering the time of day and how vocally he hates getting up before noon. Which is strange, because Donghyuck has never heard his voice ache like this before. _Why are you here?_ Donghyuck wonders, pressed close against the door, _and just what are you up to?_ He leans in closer, eyes peering through the dim light of the hallway to catch sight of two figures, Mark and Taemin grabbing him by the collar. “How could you _do_ this to him?” Taemin continues, and his grip tightens as his voice grows more frantic.

 _Oh Mark,_ Donghyuck waits silently, breathless. _Just what have you done?_

There is a tense moment of stillness, a hush in the room so blank Donghyuck can hear the beat of his own heart in his ears, so loud he worries Mark and Taemin might hear it too. 

_Something inside of me is rotten,_ Mark finally says. He blinks vacantly, then corrects himself-- _rotting._

There’s a tender vulnerability in his voice that cracks fissures through the glass of Donghyuck’s heart. 

_Oh baby. Oh Mark, sweetheart, I’m sorry._

Donghyuck wants to tell him to let go, to give up, to fall, maybe just once. Because rotting things returning to soil produce life, grow new beginnings. But maybe he doesn’t know how say that, or maybe Mark doesn’t know how to listen. So he says nothing. Leaves Mark rotting, rotting, rotting.

 _I had to do it,_ Mark says, but in the white light of morning, he sounds unsure. _He-- We want this so badly Taemin you don’t understand, we deserve--_

Taemin’s voice is venomous where he cuts Mark off. _Oh I understand_ , he hisses. _And you do too. You sold both of your lives away but you didn’t give him the choice--_

 _I didn’t have a choice,_ Mark’s whisper grows louder, more frantic.

 _There is always a choice._ Taemin’s voice is a violent calm. A snake waiting to rend limb from limb. _There is always a choice and selfishly, you didn’t give it to him. Selfishly, you came back._

Mark’s answering whisper is so quiet, Donghyuck strains at the door to hear it. _I needed one more night with him._ Donghyuck’s heart clenches in the clutch of his ribs. _I needed him,_ Mark says, and the omission dissolves in the weight of morning.

 _And you had it._ Taemin snaps, frigid enough to splint iron. _Leave_ , he says. _He’s going to be here any day, and you can’t be here when he comes._ Taemin lets go of Mark’s collar with a shove, teeth bared and stark against the gentle planes of his face.

The front door slams shut with a cracking bang, pretence of quiet forgotten, as one of them leaves. Donghyuck can make out a distant voice from down the hall shouting at them in English, a curseword he recognizes and the rest he presumes to be a threat to file a noise complaint.

He stares at the door. There’s paint peeling off the corner. He is not tired, but facing either of them is a task he is too weak to undertake. Numbly, one foot in front of the other, he makes his way back to bed and collapses to stare at the ceiling. He waits, for a long time. For the feeling to come back to his limbs, for the sense to come back to his mind. 

He thinks he can understand Mark’s rotting.

As confused as he is, his body is worn weary, muscles worked to pulp and screaming for rest. As he dozes, halfway between the world of the living and dead, he hears the bedroom door creak open. He vaguely registers the touch of a soft hand brushing hair away from his head, lips pressing a cool, dry kiss against his forehead. There is the soft scent of roses, the suggestion of tenderness. _What a nice dream,_ he muses dumbly, warmth bubbling up and dragging him under to sleep. _I don’t get those anymore._

 _I’m sorry_ , a voice whispers to him in a dream. _I’m sorry for what they’re going to do to you, silver-tongue._

When Donghyuck wakes again, sun now high in the sky of this cigarette city, Mark is still gone. This in of itself is not strange, but he feels more unsettled than ever.

Because while Mark leaves their bed in the morning, he is always in reach as Donghyuck goes about his day. He is a steady presence at his back as they practice and a weight at his side as they argue pancakes versus waffles at the canteen and a solid heat on top of him as he takes Donghyuck apart at night. Mark is hard to find but for Donghyuck, he is never hard to pin down. But when Donghyuck heads to the studio, Mark is nowhere to be found. Not with Taemin and Baekhyun at recording, not with with Taeyong, Ten and Kai at the practice room. He goes through his day on autopilot, his attention drawn away from his work to the corner of his eyes-- a space that remains empty as time passes. 

There is one last place he can go, to the person Mark goes to when he doesn’t go to Donghyuck. It’s easy to find him. When Lucas isn’t sparkling like a firework, he is waiting to burst like one. The energy that thrums in his bones has to be burned out; expunged, before it devours him whole. He’s either running or boxing--or fucking, if Donghyuck’s being honest--and it’s easy enough to find him at the gym.

Lucas is sitting down at some horrific looking machine that could double as a torture device, doing some sort of pulldown exercise that Donghyuck acknowledges makes the veins in his arms look... biteable. Afterall, Donghyuck is only human.

“Hey,” he says, tapping Lucas in the shin lightly with his foot to get his attention. He waits for Lucas to fish the earbuds out of his ears, head cocking up at Donghyuck in the fashion of some handsome, sweaty Labradoodle. _Oh you_ , Donghyuck thinks. _If you use them right, those eyes will get you anything._

“What’s up, babe.” Lucas picks up his waterbottle from the side of the machine and immediately chugs half of it. Depending on his mood, it’s going to be either wheatgrass or Four Loko. You never really know with him, Donghyuck muses.

“Not too much, babe.” Donghyuck smiles, larkspur-tender in the way that worms under Lucas’s skin, and internally crows in satisfaction at the flush that rises to the tips of Lucas’s ears. 

_So easy_. Donghyuck thinks, watching Lucas awkwardly down the rest of his drink. _So pretty and easy for me._

“Where’s Mark,” he asks, and he wonders curiously at Lucas’s expression shuttering at the question.

“Seoul,” he says shortly, even though that’s impossible. That _can’t_ be right. 

Donghyuck grabs his wrist as he moves to put his earbuds back in. Lucas, ever good-natured, leaves them out as he reaches back up for the bar. “You’re wrong,” Donghyuck says. “I saw Mark last night-- this morning even.” 

Lucas pauses on a pull-down--Donghyuck’s weight in iron plates hovering effortlesly in the air--and looks at him strangely. “I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. Mark left on a red-eye back to Seoul after the concert. A doctor’s appointment. I don’t know, management didn’t say much.” A lone bead of sweat rolls down the tawny expanse of his throat, only disappears once it runs under the loose hem of his shirt. The muscles of his back ripple as he pulls down on the bar again. 

Again and again and again, while Donghyuck waits, silent in front of him. 

But Lucas is mulish, more than Donghyuck, even giving Ten a run for his money on a good day, and it’s Donghyuck who breaks the silence. “He would have told me if he was hurt,” Donghyuck says quietly. “He always has.”

Lucas sighs, drops the weight with a clatter that nearly makes Donghyuck leap out of his skin. “People change, baby. He’s busy. Don’t take it personal.”

That stings, more so than Donghyuck should probably let it. “Don’t call me baby,” Donghyuck snips. “Only Mark calls me baby.”

 _“Right,”_ Lucas drawls, but not in his gentle way that makes Donghyuck laugh. “Well, next time I see him I’ll tell Mark to let his sidepiece fly back to Korea to hold his hand at the doctor’s office.”

He feels the damp flush of humiliation crawl up the back of his neck. “I know this is a _game_ to you,” he seethes. “But I care-- I _grew up_ with Mark, known him since we were _children_.” _He’s mine_ , he almost spits out. But that sounds too permanent, too possessive, too... much, and it doesn’t leave his throat. “He would tell me,” he says instead. “And just because you’re jealous he gives me the time of day doesn’t mean you have to be a miserable little bitc--”

“It was never a game,” Lucas interjects quietly. He is no longer aflame, but once again rippling embers under an exterior of affable charm and wide-eyed, steely control. “I can’t believe you think that I-- That you think it’s _Mark_ \--” He barks a laugh and there’s a fragment of aching within it, Donghyuck can tell, but for what he doesn’t know.

“You-- It was never a game,” he repeats. There is a moment, a single moment, where something unnameable rests between them. Lucas exhales heavily, and when their eyes meet again, the roughness is gone from his black oak-eyes. They are wide, bright, comely, sitting light on his features. The moment has passed, forever unnamed. “People change,” Lucas says. “Mark has,” he continues. “But so have you.” 

By more than just growing up, Donghyuck knows. The spring does’t heave with as many fat bluebirds as it used to. The sunsets dim quicker. It appears Lucas knows this just as deeply as Donghyuck, feels the days passing quicker just the same. Lucas is beautiful, which Donghyuck knew, but he is also falcon-keen, which Donghyuck did not.

Donghyuck doesn’t know what to say. So he doesn’t. 

He goes back to Mark’s hotel room. He texts Mark one more time but doesn’t wait for the response that isn’t going to come. He makes a home in their empty bed.

_the old dull pain, whose stitched wrists and clammy fingers,_

_far from being subverted,_

_had only slipped underneath us, freshly scrubbed._

The other members don’t like it when Donghyuck plays the piano the night before a show, so he doesn’t. 

But during the black hours before daybreak, when sleep still hasn’t found him--when he’s scared of what his mind will heave with when it does--it’s where he likes to go. Hands curled tight around a cup of lukewarm coffee as he sits cross-legged on the bench, staring out the window at the diamond city in which they live. 

So much steel, so much glass. 

Buildings that shine like iron-teeth and the messy lives of people spilt out around them. He’s been spending a lot of nights like this lately. Mark doesn’t leave his door open anymore, and the skyline is a second-best.

There’s been something strange about him lately, about Mark, that Donghyuck doesn’t know how to describe. 

Donghyuck waited and waited and waited even though he called it just living, and seven days later Mark came back to meet them on the last leg of their tour. There was something off, in the way he didn’t fit in Donghyuck’s arms right, but he refused to say what happened, what went on in those seven days he was five-thousand miles away from Donghyuck.

 _I don’t know what you mean_ , he says. _It was a doctor’s appointment, Haechannie, physical therapy, you know how it is._

Mark hasn’t gone to physical therapy since 2014, not since he sprained his ankle riding a hoverboard for _Chewing Gum_ promotions. Mark cried after they put on the cast. Not because of the pain but because of the failure. Donghyuck knows this because Donghyuck was _there_.

 _You didn’t tell me_ , Donghyuck responds weakly.

 _I didn’t know I had to,_ and Mark smiles back with too many teeth. Donghyuck is used to Mark hurting his feelings sometimes, but he never used to smile as he did it.

That was a month ago. 

Ten said that he was tired, that sometimes when people get weighed down with what the world wants from them, they get mean. He told Donghyuck to wait. That his Mark was still there, under the fame and the blood and teeth, that these things just take time. Donghyuck is tired of waiting, but he does it just the same. 

But he can’t shake it, the feeling that something is not quite right.

There’s something distant, something in his eyes has been scrubbed clean. He’s still Mark, the same Mark everyone else knows: his voice cracks when he laughs and he takes his coffee with two sugars and he strums his guitar in the evenings in the way he always does. He’s better, even-- he dances _harder_ and raps _faster_ and works _harder_ than Donghyuck has ever seen before. 

No one says anything. No one seems to see anything. Except Taemin, who won’t talk to Donghyuck except when absolutely necessary and who refuses to look at Mark for even a second.

But Donghyuck sees it. He would say something, too, if he knew the words. Mark came back from Korea too-- too nice. Too perfect. Donghyuck loves Mark, but more than that _knows_ him, his flaws and insecurities and the worst parts of him scrapped from the very bottom. And for all of Mark’s blessings, his courage and his talent and the imprint of his smile in Donghyuck’s mind and mouth-- he is voracious. He is self-appeasing. He will take what he wants and refuse what he doesn’t. There’s a constant fight in him, because he needs Donghyuck but doesn’t want to, and the result is a boy who loves brutally, beautifully.

His smiles are easy, now. It’s all wrong, sun-setting-in-the-east-unnerving. Not because Mark didn’t smile but because nothing about him was ever _easy_.

It’s silly, such a small thing, but it gnaws at him even more viciously when he tries to take Mark to bed. He doesn’t tease. He doesn’t push and pull and make Donghyuck get to his knees and call him _sir_. To submit, in where Mark thinks he’s won the battle but in truth Donghyuck has won the war.

Ten laughs at him once he gets drunk enough to confide in him. It’s kind of mean, but Ten is, in an affectionate way. _You’re angry he’s touching you softly, Haechannie? How strange. Only the two of you would get up in arms about one being sweet on the other._

Not soft. Not sweet. Mark is both in his peculiar way. This is _lukewarm,_ and he knows the difference.

Donghyuck’s an actor, an entertainer, and he knows acting when he sees it. Mark kisses him like cameras are watching. Mark used to kiss him like he hated himself for wanting it, like he was desperate for it, like how he did everything; _taking._

What can he say? They’re kinda fucked up.

A month passes, and Mark is so much better but in a way that is so much worse, perfect yet incomplete.

He’s on his third cup of coffee when the front door buzzer rings, and he cringes as the door swings open and bangs against the wall with a crack, banging against the wall with enough force to splinter.

He turns around slowly, eyes squinting against the blackness. Goosebumps prickle along his bare legs. There’s a shifting shadow slumped on the floor against the front door, hunched over a fifth of bourbon. His once carefully-gelled hair is sticking out in all directions, a gravity defying feat. His arms are tangled in a starling-black Gucci overcoat he’s struggling to take off. It’s all a little pitiful.

The figure tilts his head up, neck craning to find the light, and Donghyuck finds himself looking into Taemin’s almond eyes, bloodshot and swollen with fatigue. He creeps forward, step by careful step, and nearly jumps out of his skin when Taemin grabs his ankle, far too quickly for how drunk he seems to be. His hands are freezing-- white and threaded with tendons where they claw at him in the way of gasping, dying things.

 _“Silver-tongue,”_ He mumbles, slowly, like he’s got a mouthful of marbles or whiskey or too much to say. The hand around his ankle is cold and tight in its grip, and Donghyuck sighs. He sinks to the floor next to Taemin in a tight little ball of Mark’s clothes and anxiety and never-sated hungers. 

“What’s wrong, Taemin-hyung?” He makes his voice tender and malleable, the same way he talks to his little sister when she falls and skins her knees on the concrete. We all have our own kinds of concrete. Seems Taemin does too.

Taemin mumbles unintelligibly, lolls his head back against the wall and stares up at Donghyuck with a guileless, slack expression. Donghyuck sighs and stoops down next to him, bare knees shocked by the bone-cold marble floor. “Come on, Hyung,” he badgers gently. “Let’s get you some water and a few hours of shut-eye.” He says something again, but Donghyuck can’t quite make it out. He’s nearly incoherent in this state, breath so potently alcoholic it burns Donghyuck’s eyes when he leans in to wrangle Taemin out of his coat. 

“Come on,” he coaxes as he slings one of Taemin’s arms over one slight shoulder and heaves. Taemin is fairly light, glass-framed and lanky, but Donghyuck, who barely cracks 175 cm and is slender himself, struggles to drag him to the living room couch. They take it step by step, Donghyuck overcompensating for the sway of Taemin’s gait, and when they make it to the couch the two of them collapse into a heap, one on top of the other.

He groans as the top of Taemin’s head knocks into the bottom of his jaw, the two of them tangled in a mess of limbs and liquor and mistakes made at the bottom of the gutter. 

Taemin is muttering again, but this time Donghyuck catches some of it. _I’m not myself, Haechan-ah_ , he says, and Donghyuck pauses from where he’s struggling to sit up on his elbows. _I’m not myself anymore_ , he says. 

He rolls off of Taemin to kneel by the side of the couch. He grasps Taemin by the arm hanging off the couch and shakes him, gently, just enough to wake him from where he’s dozing. _What do you mean,_ Donghyuck says urgently. Carefully. _Taemin-hyung what do you mean by that._

Taemin is silent, eyes up, looking up to the ceiling with an unreadable expression.

Donghyuck sighs. He picks up the bottle half-full of Johnnie Walker, leaves the room half-empty to go and dump it down the kitchen sink. He comes back to replace it with a glass of lukewarm tapwater and two Advil he dug out of Taeyong’s Prada fanny pack he found slung onto the barstool. Taemin is staring at him, glassy-eyed, limbs splayed from where Donghyuck had tried to arrange them on the couch. He looks tired, like the salmon who struggle upstream against the river. He looks lost.

 _They offered me everything,_ he says, as Donghyuck fights to pull off Taemin’s shiny leather shoes. _All I wanted was to feel alive for the rest of my life._

 _You already have everything,_ Donghyuck says, just to be contrary. 

This makes Taemin laugh, a small thing broken by a hiccup. _I did, but didn’t know it. I was afraid._

 _Of what?_ Donghyuck asks, tipping Taemin’s head back and bringing the water glass to his mouth. _Exactly what were you so frightened of?_

Taemin’s teeth clank against the glass. He swallows eagerly-- water rolling in fat droplets down his chin. It’s such a vulnerable, human picture for someone Donghyuck considers to be farthest from either. _What anyone is frightened of,_ he slurs. _The end. The unknown. The act of being in both._

Donghyuck considers this, for a long moment. _I’m sorry,_ he says; _me too,_ he doesn’t. He grabs the remote from the coffee table and turns on the TV. Taemin doesn’t like sleeping in silence, Donghyuck knows, because they are the same. It feels too much like being alone.

 _Don’t be sorry,_ Taemin says. _Never be sorry, silver-tongue. I thought the end was supposed to be trumpets and thunderstorms, God sinkin’ his teeth into every tender thing, you know? But it’s not--_ He stops and yawns, canines flashing, breath so saturated with bourbon Donghyuck has to hold his breath.

He settles back into the throw pillow after he closes his mouth, clearly losing his train of thought. _But it’s not,_ Donghyuck finishes for him softly, _It’s quiet._

 _No,_ Taemin says, and there is suddenly such startling clarity in his eyes. _There’ll be no end for us,_ he says meaningfully.

The severity of his tone as he speaks, stark against the listless movement of his pupils and limbs keeps Donghyuck on edge, wary in a way he was around Taemin when they only just met. He looks away, flips through channels, past the news and obnoxious variety programming and settles on BBC. 

Safe, bland, unlikely to give anybody nightmares. 

_\--_ _it took scientists 277 attempts to create Dolly. Typically hundreds of attempts are required before one successful clone is born alive and well. Even then, the instability of the modified genome nearly ensures eventual failure. The body, unaware of how to proceed with the improved, remodeled code, follows into self-destruction. Dolly was euthanized in--_

Taemin breaks into sudden, raucous laughter. Head thrown all the way back and eyes skipping over the screen frenetically, like he doesn’t even see Donghyuck anymore. A register too high, pushed from his chest with pain behind it. 

_Taemin,_ Donghyuck whispers, shaking his shoulders. _Hyung stop, stop, you’re scaring me--_

Taemin doesn’t stop laughing, but he covers Donghyuck’s hands with his own, more tender than Donghyuck thought he could be. _I can’t die in any way that matters. Neither can Dolly and neither can he._ He says this all with the unflinching certitude of a drunken prophet, like he knows this, lives this, and is unafraid.

But Donghyuck, _oh god,_ Donghyuck is, doesn’t know what to do when the person falling to pieces in front of him isn’t Mark. He runs. Like he always does.

He covers Taemin with a blanket he finds under the couch that smells like mothballs, and as soon as he’s moderately sure he won’t throw up and choke to death, he races down the hall to the only person he knows who can fix this. Fix Taemin. The only person who anchors him--the only one left with a beating heart at least--is Kai.

He reaches Kai’s room, raises a fist to knock against the door, yet he hesitates. It feels like telling a secret, one he isn’t privy to in the first place.

He isn’t really that close with Kai. Though to his credit, not many are.

They don’t fight, not like he and Mark do. Then again, none of them fight like he and Mark do; all _fuck you_ and _you ruined my life_ and _I’m sorry baby come here and kiss me_. He and Mark are a different breed then the rest of them, but he doesn’t fight with Donghyuck the way Taemin does either, silently with sinking claws.

Even when Kai calls him _little brother_ , he makes it clear outside the camera’s eye that Donghyuck is by no means family. It’s honestly a little relieving. It’s an acquired skill, learning how to be pleasant to your coworkers and make nice without swearing a blood oath and playing at fealty.

He wonders if he learned to do that with Mark all those years ago, things would have been a lot different. Better and worse in a whole lot of ways. 

It’s almost unfathomable, a life without Mark wrapped into Donghyuck and Donghyuck intertwined back, so strange and distant his stomach twists uncomfortably at the thought. He ignores this and knocks, three sharp taps on the wood so Kai knows he means business. Kai opens the door almost immediately, and Donghyuck startles back at the sudden movement.

Kai, leaning again the doorframe--all six feet of him clothed in dark sweats and silence--is almost more intimidating then dealing with Taemin by himself. 

_He’s just Kai,_ he tells himself. _You know Kai, he’s always kind to you. Mark likes Kai. Everyone likes Kai._

He’s maybe still a little afraid of Kai.

Not for any particular reason. Sometimes he thinks Kai can just gaze right through him, through every last tender, intimate inch of him to the bitter core. The same way Taemin does. Unlike Taemin, Kai never talks about what he sees. Never pokes. Never teases. Kai never reveals his cards, and it makes Donghyuck uneasy.

Kai looks him up and down, one hand reaching to rake hair out of his eyes. It’s tangled, like he’s been tossing and turning for a real long while. “Well?” He asks, tired but not unkindly. His voice is scratchy and the bags under his eyes are puffy, but he’s still handsome, so handsome Donghyuck feels like he shouldn’t be allowed to talk to him.

Kai is all movie star teeth and private, private life behind velvet ropes-- that too, makes Donghyuck uneasy.

“It’s Taemin,” he blurts, feeling all too much like a chid confessing to a wrong in the middle of the night. “He’s-- he came in drunk talking all this stuff about--” Taemin’s voice echoes like a cry in the forefront of his mind. _I can’t die in any way that matters._ Kai’s eyes narrow. “--I don’t know,” Donghyuck trails off quietly. 

He’s looking at Donghyuck curiously, and a flush of embarassment shivers through him. He’d probably be feeling the same, if the youngest and shortest and silliest came barging into his room in the black of night, muttering about things he can’t begin to understand. He shifts from one foot to the other, “He doesn’t seem... awake. Stable. Not sober, for sure.”

Kai’s eyebrows pinch together, tight and engraved with tension, and Donghyuck feels his heart pick up, rabbit quick. He’s not in trouble but it sure seems to feel like it. “Did he say anything about,” he pauses. “Rotting?” Kai is completely awake now, blackthorn eyes handsome and flint hard as they stare right through him.

It was hard to make heads or tails of what he was saying at all, but Donghyuck tries. “Maybe,” he says. “He was stupid drunk, but he mentioned death.” Kai’s expression blackens further and without knowing why, Donghyuck’s heart drops to his feet. “He mentioned the end of things. God and trumpets.”

Kai exhales deeply, rakes a hand back through his hair with vicious tugs. Donghyuck can barely make out him murmuring, _this again._ He squares his shoulders, muscles bunched and ready for a fight, face wan and more nakedly weary than Donghyuck has ever seen him.

“Kai,” he says, voice trembling and bursting from his throat. “Should I be afraid?”

His eyes flash, narrowed to slits and simmering with something unknowable. “Of what? Donghyuck-ah.” He shuts the door behind him with a click and turns to face Donghyuck once again, paparazzi smile slicked onto his face. A smile that says, _Don’t you love me? Can’t you trust me?_ A smile weakened by the tension rising high in his shoulders and the chill palpable underneath. “What is there to be afraid of?” Kai says, and the white-knuckled clench of his fists says _very very much_.

They stand there, the two of them, alone in the moonless black of the hall, eyes locked and neither daring to leave, to lose control. Donghyuck can hear the drunken cracks of Taemin’s laughter filter from the living room. It is not happy laughter. The sound pulls Kai through the cracks in his armor and his expression slackens, reveals-- and _oh_ how weary he is.

“I have to go,” Kai mutters, more to himself than Donghyuck. His eyes go in and out of focus, exhausted and strung-thin, “I have to take care of him.” He pushes past where Donghyuck has planted himself in front of his door, doesn’t turn around as his elbow hits Donghyuck in the side with a bitter _thump_ and Donghyuck doubles over into a wheeze. 

_Fuck you,_ Donghyuck thinks, grasping at his side that is sure to bruise. _Fuck you and whatever you’re not telling me, I’ll find out myself._

He turns and breaks into a loping sprint to catch Kai who is already down the hallway and halfway to the living room, grabs his elbow with what he knows is an excess of force. He doesn’t care, and with his frustration, the crush of his nails as they sink into Kai’s arm feels _good,_ like he is once again back in control. “Tell me,” Donghyuck spits. “ _Tell me_ what’s going on Kai--” his voice suddenly cracks, right in the middle, heart spitting out his throat he is so _afraid_ \-- “Please,” he finishes weakly.

Kai does not flinch, at the bite of his fingers or words or desperation heady in his eyes. “It’s nothing, Donghyuck.” He breaks out of Donghyuck’s grasp with ease, but he’s gentle, this time, or tries to be. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

Donghyuck does not laugh at the irony of it, the promise to talk of nothing in the morning. He goes back to bed, ducks back into the silent reprieve of his room, where Ten is still as the grave under the blankets across the room. _Life gets hard sometimes,_ is what he tells himself once he’s deep under the covers. _Stays that way for a real long while._

 _Taemin will be fine, and if he’s not, there’s nothing I can do,_ is what he tells himself.

Morning comes and Kai shows up to practice tugging a hungover and brutally silent Taemin behind him. When Donghyuck approaches, Kai gives him a tight-lipped smile and nothing else. Donghyuck can take a hint.

They don’t speak of that night again.

_Mirrors and shop windows returned our faces to us,_

_replete with the tight lips and the eyes that remained eyes_

_and not the doorways we had hoped for._

He’s been having dreams. Slow, strange nightmares where he wakes up not knowing who he is.

Sometimes he’s on a chrome table. Faces in masks that peer down at him and don’t see a person. Sometimes Hyojin is there. He is made and unmade, again and again and again, except this time they rip him apart to do it. Sometimes he dreams that Mark is next to him, and when Donghyuck reaches out he dissolves, melting into a pile of blood and blue veins and other forgotten things. 

These dreams follow him into the light of day, melt into the rest of the feelings that are buried between his ribs and the valves of his heart. The tar-pit exhaustion. The coke-bottle pressure when he’s all shook up. Melancholy for a place he can’t even name. The others treat summer days in Naples like a golden vat of honey wine, and Donghyuck hates that he’s the only one drowning in it.

There are so many ways he tries to explain it, like when your shoes are tied too tight or like when you uproot the peonies and let them wither on the lawn. When you strap the saint to the pyre and he tries not to scream. There are so many ways to say it, and he does, but the staff tell him that stretched-thin does not equate snapping. 

They give him pills for it, red ones, to make him sleep, and they work but they make the dreams worse, make them come _alive_. But it’s what he has to do, he knows. Take the red pills for the red-hot rioting soul.

He looks deep and finds the rubber in him, even when the laughter in him spoils like fruit. _I’m tired_ , he tells Taemin one day--even though they aren’t close--because he’s learned that Taemin understands _rotting_. 

Taemin tells Kai and Kai tells Taeyong and Taeyong tells Baekhyun, and soon enough the eldest of their cohort are clucking around him like mother hens. Taemin comes back from the market with cherries of brilliant vermillion, ties a delicate gold chain he bought in Milan around Donghyuck’s wrist, leaves without another word. Taeyong passes bottle after bottle of water into his hands, ruffles his hair with thin fingers and apologizes profusely when it gets caught in his rings. Even Kai gives him a stiff, one-armed hug on his way out to lunch. He tries. 

Baekhyun begs off afternoon practice-- he whinges and complains of heatstroke and sunburn and points out the strawberry seed freckles covering Donghyuck’s cheeks to the staff. They let them, not because of his grumbling but because he works as hard as a mule with stubbornness of one as well. _The dramatics are for the hell of it,_ he tells Donghyuck with a wink.

They’re sitting in the shade of the balcony for high-noon, eating cherries and sucking red from the pits. Baekhyun is sharing his weed with him, passing a hand-rolled joint from ruby-stained hand to hand.

He takes a deep breath in around the butt of the joint, feels the smoke cloy on his lips and cotton fill his head. It feels dizzy like dancing too much, and even though he coughs when he breathes out, Baekhyun doesn’t laugh. Mark said long ago that Baekhyun was fond of him. That they both laugh in the face of world burning. He doesn’t feel like laughing right now, and wonders what that means. He can feel the blood running through his body, the weight of his skin as it hangs off his flesh. He feels grounded, feels gravity pinning him down to earth in a way he hasn’t felt since he was fourteen and a fresh transplant to Seoul. 

He feels concrete-solid, for once not the ghost of a gunshot boy.

“Baekhyun-hyung,” He speaks before he even knows the words are leaving his mouth. “How can you feel homesick for someplace you don’t even know?” 

_That doesn’t even make sense_ , and Donghyuck takes another pull from the joint to supress a cringe of embarrassment, but feels it flare even brighter when it launches him into a coughing fit. He likes the feeling of cherries in his mouth more than smoke. He wonders if that makes him childish, to crave just a little bit of honey sweet.

“I don’t know, kid,” Baekhyun replies, and when he takes the joint from Donghyuck’s grasp his fingers are gentle. He breathes, in and out, smoke curling around his face and reaching out to kiss Donghyuck’s freckled cheeks, “But I do know that after a while, when the days start to copy, you start to crave the original, the real, the template from before all of this. You start to wonder if it was ever really there.”

“That’s awful,” Donghyuck says, licking the sugarcane crimson from his fingers.

“That’s _la dolce vita,”_ Baehkyun says. He takes a breath of smoke and shudders as he breathes out, smoke looping around to frame his features, eyes lidded and distant.

He looks curiously to where Baekhyun is leaning all the way back on the lawn chair they stole from the pool deck. His neck is stretched and dappled golden in the sunlight that reaches through the screen. He looks jeweled and saturated, a real Vermeer-boy. Donghyuck is suddenly struck by how raw and heart-rending it all is, all of this. That all eight of them are making their way through the world, and among this chaos they are all screaming together, _love me for this! For what I give! For something! Anything!_

He shakes his head, groggy. He’s a little high, a little out of it, a little struck-stupid by the caress of Italian sun. He pops another cherry in his mouth and tries to tie the stem in a knot the way Mark taught him last summer. 

_His wounds healed, the skin a bit thicker than before,_

_scars like train tracks on his arms and on his body underneath his shirt._

They give him a solo. He knows it for what it is-- Taeyong’s reset after the murderous glamour of _GTA_ before the sex and silk of _Baby Don’t Stop_ , he’s an intermission at best. But it’s still nice, to hear the crowd cheering for him, _only_ him. 

_Continuity,_ it’s called. About love surviving, through grief made solid and time passed. Donghyuck is fond of it, in a deep, secret place, somewhere he used to be wounded, somewhere he still aches. 

It’s ballad. Old school synthesizers and aching, tenous backing vocals. Lucas says it’s a sad song, but Donghyuck doesn’t quite agree. He tells Lucas that it’s not sad but bittersweet, and he refuses to make it sad because it’s _his._ Taemin says he’s a martyr with a bleeding heart, that love should never have to hurt. Taeyong says when you love too hard it’s easy to feel it too keenly.

Baekhyun calls it a slow dance song. It makes Donghyuck happy, to think about it like that. 

Twenty or thirty years from now, a young girl is going to approach another and say _my isn’t this silly, but I love this song so won’t you dance with me?_ Maybe she’ll lean in close under the polyester banners hung from the gym ceiling and tuck her lover’s hair behind her ear, say _Haechan can sure sing pretty but it’s nothing compared to the sight of you, sweetheart._ Maybe she would blush. They’ll sway to the music and maybe they’ll tug each other a little closer with hands wrapped gentle around warm skin and the gauze of prom dresses. Maybe one will say, _I got all his records if you’d want to come over to mine and listen, dollface._

He might be a romantic, but more than anything, he just wants to leave his mark. On something. Someone. Anyone at all.

He’s sitting on the practice room floor, listening to the melody of his song, his very own, fatten and wane as it plays on repeat. There are bruises blushing across his skin--it hurts--but he always hurts, and Donghyuck has long since learned to find comfort in the familiarity of it.

The door behind him open and shuts. He doesn’t turn around.

”I know you’re hurting,” Taeyong says. His eyes are red-rimmed and distant. He has pretty eyes. He has tired, tired eyes. “But you don’t have to,” He reprimands softly. 

_No_ , Donghyuck thinks, _I have to be perfect_.

Eventually, as Taeyong realizes Donghyuck isn’t going to respond, he sighs, and wraps his thin arms around Donghyuck’s shoulders. As his leader, he recognizes a losing battle when he sees it. They don’t speak for a very long time. 

“We’re going to that club in Gangnam-district for Mark’s birthday tomorrow night, the _Lotus-Eaters_.” Donghyuck knows the _Lotus-Eaters_ , it’d be hard not to, with celebrities stumbling drunk and rumpled out of its doors plastered on the front of magazines. He’d been there once before, with Mark, underage and sneaking in behind the bouncer’s back, celebrating the roaring debut of unit _127_. The place stank of smoke and new money, but Donghyuck remembers the press of Mark’s lean arms as he danced within them and breath hot with whiskey when they kissed, and thinks of it warmly, thinks of it late at night when Mark is not there.

Taeyong eyes him carefully, hovering at the boundary of the door as he finally moves to leave. “You should come, Donghyuck-ah. You always feel better dancing.” 

He’s only partially right. To Taeyong, the state of _feeling better_ and dancing is one and the same. If you’re doing one you’re doing the other. Donghyuck likes to dance, loves it even, but not for the sake of itself-- like Taeyong does. For Donghyuck, dancing is fun as long as it’s an act of revelry. Revelry holds hands with forgetting and forgetting holds hands with enduring. If he can dance he can still endure.

He looks down at his hand, where Taeyong’s phone lies in his palm. Taeyong had a misspent youth-- a pretty face to distract from his sticky fingers. If you catch Taeyong when he’s tipsy and in good mood, he’ll teach you his tricks. Donghyuck hopes Taeyong won’t be angry that he used his own bad habits against him, but he tells himself it’s for a good cause. 

He stares at his reflection for a very long time. If he looks too hard at the mirror, someone else is looking back. 

**Author's Note:**

> Find the original poem [here](http://youngerpoets.yupnet.org/2008/04/22/little-beast-crush-by-richard-siken/)
> 
> Let me know what you think in the comments, or on twt @sidstarbursts
> 
> Thanks for reading <3


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